Exploring Recommendation Systems

While we commonly associate recommendation systems with e-commerce, their application extends to any decision-making problem which requires pairing two types of things together. To understand why recommenders don't always work as well as we'd like them to, we set out to build some basic recommendation systems using publicly available data. The first ingredient for building a recommendation system is user interaction data. We experimented with two different datasets, one from Flickr and one from Amazon. The Flickr dataset contains interactions between users and photos that they liked; the Amazon dataset contains user ratings on books.