See the howto pages for details on starting this project, code, and the details pages for more details. The pages here describe in broad strokes what this assignment is about.
A video describing the Netflix contest and prize.
Collaborative filtering and content-based filtering are two kinds of recommender systems that provide users with information to help them find and choose anything from books, to movies, to restaurants, to courses based on their own preferences compared to the preferences of others.
In 2009 Netflix awarded one million dollars to a group that had developed a better-recommender system than the Netflix, in-house system. This NY Times Magazine article describes the competition, the winning teams, and how the movie Napolean Dynamite caused problems for the algorithms and ranking/rating systems developed by contest participants.
In this assignment, you'll develop a program to test three different algorithms for recommending items based on the responses made by others. You'll be practicing reading data from files, using Python dictionaries and lists, and sorting data to find good matches.
The assignment comes in two conceptual parts:
We're providing three sources of data. Sometimes ratings are stored in a single file, sometimes in more than one file. You'll need to write a separate Python module to deal with each data source, then use what these modules return to develop ratings.
This first set of recommendations for Prof. Astrachan comes from Netflix a while ago. As you can see, these recommendations are based on two movies seen and then all the data Netflix has on similar movies.
This next set of recommendations is for Prof. Rodger on Nov 24 for books as reported to her from Amazon, based mostly on purchases for books (guess what her 15 year old just got for his birthday?).
The types of ratings you will see in all the data files uses ratings from 5 to -5.
Rating Meaning 5 Really liked it! 3 Liked it! 1 Okay — neither hot nor cold about it 0 Have not read it -1 Not bad — but nothing really to say about it -3 Didn't like it -5 Hated it!
Expectations: For this assignment you are expected to have well documented code and style. This means you should have a comment for each main block of code to describe in words what the code is doing. You should have your name near the top of each file as a comment. See other expectations for style on the main assignment page.
PLEASE NOTE you will lose points for code that is not well commented!
ITEMS to Submit:
Module FoodReader.py:
get_data( food )itlist and rdict. SUBMIT ONE OF BookReader.py OR MovieReader.py:
Module BookReader.py:
get_data( books, ratings )itlist and rdict. Module MovieReader.py:
get_data( movieratings )itlist and rdict.Module Recommender.py:
average( items, ratings )avListsimilarities( name, ratings )simList recommended( simList, items, ratings, n )recList
For extra credit, also write MovieReader.py or BookReader.py (the one you didn't write above) to include recommendations on movies.
Submit the items to the folder assign8-recommender using eclipse/ambient or the websubmit.
Your grade will be based on how well your program functions and also on
style (comments, name near the top of each file, meaningful names for
variables).
(Go to howto) (Go to details)