Movie Recommendations With Spark Collaborative Filtering - DZone AI

Collaborative filtering (CF)[1] based on the alternating least squares (ALS) technique[2] is another algorithm used to generate recommendations. It produces automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting preferences from many other users (collaborating). The underlying assumption of the collaborative filtering approach is that if a person A has the same opinion as a person B on an issue, A is more likely to have B's opinion on a different issue than a randomly chosen person. This algorithm gained a lot of traction in the data science community after it was used by the team winner of the Netflix Prize. The CF algorithm has also been implemented in Spark MLlib[3] with the aim to address fast execution on very large datasets.