I've built a recommender system for my movie database app "Coollector Movie Database". It's based on Collaborative filtering and it took me 2 years to implement. I built it from scratch and it's unique in several ways (for example, you can view the reliability of each recommendation). The technical difficulty is to crunch fast enough a huge quantity of data. I've had to apply all the optimizations that I could think…
How would you generalize the method you are using?
Ask HN: Has anyone built a recommendation engine in-house?
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As long as the users rate how much they like something, my method could easily work with songs or books or anything.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone built a recommendation engine in-house?
#42I've built a recommender system for my movie database app "Coollector Movie Database". It's based on Collaborative filtering and it took me 2 years to implement. I built it from scratch and it's unique in several ways (for example, you can view the reliability of each recommendation). The technical difficulty is to crunch fast enough a huge quantity of data. I've had to apply all the optimizations that I could think…
How would you generalize the method you are using?
I don't like ML frameworks (Tensorflow, etc...), maybe it's because I haven't tried them. My understanding is that they're like a magic black box: you input some data, you adjust some settings, and you wish for the results to be good. Instead, I've taken a direct approach to the collaborative filtering problem, the difficulty being to correlate a huge amount of data. Some said that only quantum computers would one day be fast enough to solve the recommendation problem, until recently a student demonstrated that it could be solved with classical computers.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/teenager-finds-classical-alte...
This student's algorithm is quite different from mine, but I suppose that my algorithm is yet another example of solving the recommendation problem with classical computers.