Recommendation System

A machine learning algorithm known as a recommendation system combines information about

users and products to forecast a user's potential interests. These systems are used in a wide range
of applications, such as e-commerce, social media, and entertainment, to provide personalized
recommendations to users.
There are several types of recommendation systems, including:
Content-based filtering: This type of system uses the characteristics of items that a user has
liked in the past to recommend similar items.
Collaborative filtering: This type of system uses the past behaviour of users to recommend
items that similar users have liked.
Hybrid: To generate suggestions, this kind of system combines content-based filtering and
collaborative filtering techniques.
Matrix Factorization: Using this method, the user-item matrix is divided into two lower-
dimension matrices that are then utilized to generate predictions.
Deep Learning: To train the user and item representations that are subsequently utilized to
generate recommendations, these models make use of neural networks.
Content Based Recommender System
A Content-Based Recommender works by the data that we take from the user, either explicitly
(rating) or implicitly (clicking on a link). By the data we create a user profile, which is then
used to suggest to the user, as the user provides more input or take more actions on the
recommendation, the engine becomes more accurate.

User Profile: In the User Profile, we create vectors that describe the user’s preference. In the
creation of a user profile, we use the utility matrix which describes the relationship between
user and item. With this information, the best estimate we can make regarding which item user
likes, is some aggregation of the profiles of those items. Item Profile: In Content-Based
Recommender, we must build a profile for each item, which will represent the important
characteristics of that item. For example, if we make a movie as an item then its actors,
director, release year and genre are the most significant features of the movie. We can also add
its rating from the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) in the Item Profile. Utility Matrix: Utility
Matrix signifies the user’s preference with certain items. In the data gathered from the user, we
have to find some relation between the items which are liked by the user and those which are
disliked, for this purpose we use the utility matrix. In it we assign a particular value to each
user-item pair, this value is known as the degree of preference. Then we draw a matrix of a
user with the respective items to identify their preference relationship.

Some of the columns are blank in the matrix that is because we don’t get the whole input from
the user every time, and the goal of a recommendation system is not to fill all the columns but
to recommend a movie to the user which he/she will prefer. Through this table, our
recommender system won’t suggest Movie 3 to User 2, because in Movie 1 they have given
approximately the same ratings, and in Movie 3 User 1 has given the low rating, so it is highly
possible that User 2 also won’t like it. Recommending Items to User Based on Content:

 Method 1: We can use the cosine distance between the vectors of the item and the
user to determine its preference to the user. For explaining this, let us consider an
example: We observe that the vector for a user will have a positive number for
actors that tend to appear in movies the user likes and negative numbers for actors
user doesn’t like, Consider a movie with actors which user likes and only a few
actors which user doesn’t like, then the cosine angle between the user’s and movie’s
vectors will be a large positive fraction. Thus, the angle will be close to 0, therefore
a small cosine distance between the vectors. It represents that the user tends to like
the movie, if the cosine distance is large, then we tend to avoid the item from the
recommendation.

 Method 2: We can use a classification approach in the recommendation systems

too, like we can use the Decision Tree for finding out whether a user wants to watch
a movie or not, like at each level we can apply a certain condition to refine our
recommendation.
For example:

Collaborative Filtering

In Collaborative Filtering, we tend to find similar users and recommend what similar users
like. In this type of recommendation system, we don’t use the features of the item to
recommend it, rather we classify the users into clusters of similar types and recommend each
user according to the preference of its cluster.
There are basically four types of algorithms o say techniques to build Collaborative filtering-
based recommender systems:
 Memory-Based
 Model-Based
 Hybrid
 Deep Learning

 Advantages of Collaborative Filtering-Based Recommender Systems

As we know there are two types of recommender systems. The content-based recommender
systems have limited use cases and have higher time complexity. Also, this algorithm is
based on some limited content but that is not the case in Collaborative Filtering based
algorithms. One of the main advantages that these recommender systems have is that they
are highly efficient in providing personalized content but also able to adapts to changing
user preferences.
 Measuring Similarity
 A simple example of the movie recommendation system will help us in explaining:

In this type of scenario, we can see that User 1 and User 2 give nearly similar ratings to
the movie, so we can conclude that Movie 3 is also going to be averagely liked by User
1 but Movie 4 will be a good recommendation to User 2, like this we can also see that
there are users who have different choices like User 1 and User 3 are opposite to each
other. One can see that User 3 and User 4 have a common interest in the movie, on that
basis we can say that Movie 4 is also going to be disliked by User 4. This is
Collaborative Filtering; we recommend to users the items which are liked by users of
similar interest domains.

 Cosine Similarity
 We can also use the cosine similarity between the users to find out the users with
similar interests, larger cosine implies that there is a smaller angle between two users,
hence they have similar interests. We can apply the cosine distance between two users
in the utility matrix, and we can also give the zero value to all the unfilled columns to
make calculation easy, if we get smaller cosine then there will be a larger distance
between the users, and if the cosine is larger than we have a small angle between the
users, and we can recommend them similar things.

 Rounding the Data

 In collaborative filtering, we round off the data to compare it more easily like we can
assign below 3 ratings as 0 and above of it as 1, this will help us to compare data more
easily, for example:

 We again took the previous example and we apply the rounding-off process, as you can
see how much more readable the data has become after performing this process, we can
see that User 1 and User 2 are more similar and User 3 and User 4 are more alike.
 Normalizing Rating
 In the process of normalizing, we take the average rating of a user and subtract all the
given ratings from it, so we’ll get either positive or negative values as a rating, which
 can simply classify further into similar groups. By normalizing the data we can make
clusters of the users that give a similar rating to similar items and then we can use these
clusters to recommend items to the users.
Challenges to be Faced while using Collaborative Filtering

As we know, every algorithm has its pros and cons and so is the case with Collaborative
Filtering Algorithms. Collaborative Filtering algorithms are very dynamic and can change as
well as adapt to the changes in user preferences with time. But one of the main issues which
are faced by recommender systems is that of scalability because as the user base increases then
the respective sizes for the computation and the data storage space all increase manifold which
leads to slow and inaccurate results.

Also, collaborative filtering algorithms fail to recommend a diversity of products as they are
based on historical data and hence provide recommendations related to them as well.

Matrix Factorization
Choosing the Objective Function

One intuitive objective function is the squared distance. To do this, minimize the sum of squared
errors over all pairs of observed entries: