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I'm looking for an appliance solution for the textbook example of users-books-genres recommendations. I've read articles and books that present this as a clas

I'm looking for an appliance solution for the textbook example of users-books-genres recommendations. I've read articles and books that present this as a classic problem but haven't seen a packaged appliance that helps me put data in and get recommendations out. Is there such a thing? Is there a reason such a thing can't exist without putting the developer through a big learning curve? I have an ebook site with around 100k registered users and 1M bookmarks (what they read). Every book is well categorized with one or more tags. I'm guessing I have enough data to feed the recommender but have put off trying as the learning curve seems like more than I have time for.

reverius42 12y ago
Disclaimer: I work for GraphLab Inc. GraphLab Create aims to do what you're describing in terms of solving this problem without a big learning curve. I'm not sure what you are looking for in an appliance solution -- it's a Python package, but does not require a lot code to get good results, so hopefully this may qualify. With 5 lines of Python code to import your dataset and train an out-of-box model, you can get up and running with a basic recommender. Some data munging may be required to get things into the format our model expects, but I'd love to hear what format your data is in if some munging is necessary so we can make our API as easy to use as possible. You can follow the tutorial [1] to create a basic recommender (if you want to try out GraphLab Create on your machine, just pip install graphlab-create and come to our website to get a product key [2]). [1] http://graphlab.com/learn/notebooks/basic_recommender_functionalities.html http://graphlab.com/learn/notebooks/basic_recommender_functi... [2] http://graphlab.com/products/create/quick-start-guide.html http://graphlab.com/products/create/quick-start-guide.html
- jhancock 12y ago
  Thanks! I'll give this a try. My data is in mongodb using ruby/rails as a web front. Data structure shouldn't be too hard...its just books, users, bookmarks, and tags/genre. All have unique ids (mongo UUIDs for users, books, and basic integer ids for the tags) and simple associations so I guess it couldn't be too hard to import. I'm thinking an offline system would be fine for some experiments. Not sure I need some real-time recommender integrated...but I'm new to this, so I guess I'm still not sure what I need.
  - reverius42 12y ago
    The simplest way to start out would be to import from CSV (assuming it's easy to dump users/books/tags from MongoDB to CSV), use that to train the model, then dump the recommendations from the model back to CSV (or using Python code, write them directly to MongoDB). That would give you an offline system with one-time recommendations. You could then run this in batch, on a schedule, to re-train as you get new tags/bookmarks and update the recommendations periodically.

reverius42 12y ago

Disclaimer: I work for GraphLab Inc. GraphLab Create aims to do what you're describing in terms of solving this problem without a big learning curve. I'm not sure what you are looking for in an appliance solution -- it's a Python package, but does not require a lot code to get good results, so hopefully this may qualify. With 5 lines of Python code to import your dataset and train an out-of-box model, you can get up and running with a basic recommender. Some data munging may be required to get things into the format our model expects, but I'd love to hear what format your data is in if some munging is necessary so we can make our API as easy to use as possible. You can follow the tutorial [1] to create a basic recommender (if you want to try out GraphLab Create on your machine, just pip install graphlab-create and come to our website to get a product key [2]). [1] http://graphlab.com/learn/notebooks/basic_recommender_functionalities.html http://graphlab.com/learn/notebooks/basic_recommender_functi... [2] http://graphlab.com/products/create/quick-start-guide.html http://graphlab.com/products/create/quick-start-guide.html

jhancock 12y ago
Thanks! I'll give this a try. My data is in mongodb using ruby/rails as a web front. Data structure shouldn't be too hard...its just books, users, bookmarks, and tags/genre. All have unique ids (mongo UUIDs for users, books, and basic integer ids for the tags) and simple associations so I guess it couldn't be too hard to import. I'm thinking an offline system would be fine for some experiments. Not sure I need some real-time recommender integrated...but I'm new to this, so I guess I'm still not sure what I need.
- reverius42 12y ago
  The simplest way to start out would be to import from CSV (assuming it's easy to dump users/books/tags from MongoDB to CSV), use that to train the model, then dump the recommendations from the model back to CSV (or using Python code, write them directly to MongoDB). That would give you an offline system with one-time recommendations. You could then run this in batch, on a schedule, to re-train as you get new tags/bookmarks and update the recommendations periodically.