Recommender Systems: What goes into making one? — A Checklist
This article uncovers the key components of recommender systems, algorithms, and considerations behind their effectiveness.
Suggested Pre-Read:
A good recommender system is one that
- provides accurate and relevant recommendations to users,
- enhances their experience and
- drives desired outcomes, such as increased sales or user engagement.
Building an effective recommender system involves several key components and considerations. We will discuss them one by one.
1. Data Collection and Storage:
1.1 High-quality and diverse data sources:
Gather user data, including preferences, behavior, and interactions with the system.
Apache Kafka: Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that can be used to collect and process real-time data from various sources. It is often used for ingesting and processing large volumes of user interaction data.
Google Analytics: For web-based recommender systems, Google Analytics can help track user behavior, including page views, clicks, and conversions.
Social Media APIs: Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram offer APIs that allow you to collect user data, comments, likes, and shares.
1.2 Data preprocessing: Clean, normalize, and transform data to remove noise and inconsistencies.
Python Libraries (Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-Learn): These libraries provide a wide range of data preprocessing tools for cleaning, transforming, and normalizing data. Pandas, in particular, is popular for data manipulation.
Apache Spark: Spark’s data preprocessing capabilities are often used for large-scale data cleaning and transformation tasks.
