Anyone else used Mahout? What are your experiences with it?
My team at Amazon is using it. There's also been some talks given on it at Amazon.
Building a recommendation engine, foursquare style
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Re: Building a recommendation engine, foursquare style
#12Anyone else used Mahout? What are your experiences with it?
I am currently using Mahout at work for k-means clustering and singular value decomposition. It seems to be working well.
Re: Building a recommendation engine, foursquare style
#13Regarding the issue of user-based feedback ranking (the Per Se vs. Shake Shack problem), it may not be such a negative thing to have results skewed due to "unequal" ratings. Culinary ratings often are a result of many factors that civilian diners may not consider necessarily important or even relevant. Looking to Foursquare to show search results based on user approval, which often is submitted on a knee-jerk reaction after dining, may be the best thing for a prospective diner. After all, Per Se and Shake Shack may have 5 stars rewarded to them by the same diner, but unless this diner is making hundreds of thousands a year (or is Thomas Keller), they would likely recommend Shake Shack as the spot to eat to their Foursquare friends. To me, hedging this data will end up producing results along the lines of more traditional culinary recommendation systems, and may be devaluing the Foursquare recommendation engine.
Re: Building a recommendation engine, foursquare style
#14By setting some constraints on which scores were significant, it was possible to build the resulting similarity matrix in less than an hour on a 40-machine cluster 40 machines!?! Wow. We compute our recommendations at Grooveshark in a couple hours on a crappy 2-node Hadoop cluster. hah. We have about as many songs as they have venues, so I have no idea why they need so many nodes. Or maybe we're just extraordinarily…
Delis are our Coldplay.
Re: Building a recommendation engine, foursquare style
#15Anyone else used Mahout? What are your experiences with it?
We tried using it a while ago when it was first getting started. It was a pain to use back then but afaik it has advanced quite a bit and after seeing this post I'll be taking another jab at it. If you want an out-of-the-box recommender, Mahout is good while providing many other Machine Learning algorithms that can be run at scale. You definitely need to have some technical knowledge though. One thing that I don't li…
Agreed, it has a very steep learning curve. Once you understand it (and understand how to think in map-reduce), it's pretty awesome -- and easy to extend. Rolling your own definitely makes the learning curve easier, but you can miss out on some of the M-R efficient algorithms that are built in it.