A recommendation system, also known as a recommender system, is a class of machine learning that leverages data to predict, narrow down, and find what people are looking for among an exponentially growing number of options. These systems are commonly used in online shopping and video streaming websites to suggest products or movies based on various criteria such as past purchases, search history, demographic information, and other factors. The algorithms used in recommendation systems are typically associated with machine learning and utilize Big Data to make these suggestions.
Despite their significant commercial importance, recommender systems receive surprisingly little attention from academia. They are responsible for moving billions of dollars worth of value or products around, making them a crucial technology in the digital marketplace.
Recommender systems are trained to understand the preferences, previous decisions, and characteristics of people and products using data gathered about their interactions. This training process falls under unsupervised machine learning, as there are no labels indicating whether a particular item is related to others or not. Instead, the algorithms rely on textual information to identify and visualize similarities before recommending items to users.
Key Points:
- Definition: A recommendation system uses data to predict and narrow down options for users.
- Applications: Commonly used in online shopping and video streaming to suggest products or movies.
- Criteria: Based on past purchases, search history, demographic information, and other factors.
- Machine Learning: Associated with machine learning and utilizes Big Data.
- Commercial Importance: Moves billions of dollars worth of value or products around.
- Academic Attention: Receives surprisingly little attention from academia.
- Training: Trained to understand user and product preferences using interaction data.
- Unsupervised Learning: No labels are provided; algorithms identify similarities based on textual information.
Sources
Recommendation system, Nvidia
Unleash the Hidden Patterns: A Guide to Unsupervised Machine Learning for Article Recommender System, towardsdatascience.com