Design Patterns for Recommendation Systems – Everyone Wants a Pony

Ted Dunning (Chief Application Architect at MapR) and Ellen Friedman have written a new O'Reilly Media book on "Practical Machine Learning – Innovations in Recommendation" (released in January 2014). This book examines one of the most interesting, fun, and powerful data science applications in the big data universe: recommendation systems. For me, this was one of the most interesting applications of data mining that immediately captured my imagination after I embarked on the journey to data science (drifting away from my astrophysics roots) about a dozen years ago. It is also one of the most common use cases that are taught in data science MOOCs and other analytics training courses. I believe that the love affair with recommender systems can be partly attributed to two things.