Evaluation Metrics for Recommender Systems – Towards Data Science

Recommender systems are growing progressively more popular in online retail because of their ability to offer personalized experiences to unique users. Mean Average Precision at K (MAP@K) is typically the metric of choice for evaluating the performance of a recommender systems. However, the use of additional diagnostic metrics and visualizations can offer deeper and sometimes surprising insights into a model's performance. This article explores Mean Average Recall at K (MAR@K), Coverage, Personalization, and Intra-list Similarity, and uses these metrics to compare three simple recommender systems. If you would like to use any of the metrics or plots discussed in this article, I have made them all available in a python library recmetrics.