Course Overview

Recommendation systems are at the heart of almost every internet business today; from Facebook to Netflix to Amazon. Providing good recommendations, whether its friends, movies, or groceries, goes a long way in defining user experience and enticing your customers to use your platform.

This course shows you how to do just that. You will learn about the different kinds of recommenders used in the industry and see how to build them from scratch using Python. No need to wade through tons of machine learning theory - you will get started with building and learning about recommenders as quickly as possible. In this course, you will build an IMDB Top 250 clone, a content-based engine that works on movie metadata. You will also use collaborative filters to make use of customer behavior data, and a Hybrid Recommender that incorporates content based and collaborative filtering techniques.

Students will learn to build industry-standard recommender systems, leveraging basic Python syntax skills. This is an applied course, so machine learning theory is only used to highlight how to build recommenders in this course.

Key Learning Areas

This skills-focused combines engaging lecture, demos, group activities and discussions with machine-based student labs and exercises. Our engaging instructors and mentors are highly experienced practitioners who bring years of current, modern "on-the-job" modern applied Data Science, AI and Machine Learning experience into every classroom and hands-on project.

Working in a hands-on lab environment led by our expert instructor, attendees will

  • Understand the different kinds of recommender systems
  • Master data-wrangling techniques using the pandas library
  • Building an IMDB Top 250 Clone
  • Build a content-based engine to recommend movies based on real movie metadata
  • Employ data-mining techniques used in building recommenders
  • Build industry-standard collaborative filters using powerful algorithms
  • Building Hybrid Recommenders that incorporate content based and collaborative filtering

Course Outline

Please note that this list of topics is based on our standard course offering, evolved from typical industry uses and trends. We will work with you to tune this course and level of coverage to target the skills you need most.

Getting Started with Recommender Systems

  • Technical requirements
  • What is a recommender system?
  • Types of recommender systems

Manipulating Data with the Pandas Library

  • Technical requirements
  • Setting up the environment
  • The Pandas library
  • The Pandas DataFrame
  • The Pandas Series

Building an IMDB Top 250 Clone with Pandas

  • Technical requirements
  • The simple recommender
  • The knowledge-based recommender

Building Content-Based Recommenders

  • Technical requirements
  • Exporting the clean DataFrame
  • Document vectors
  • The cosine similarity score
  • Plot description-based recommender
  • Metadata-based recommender
  • Suggestions for improvements

Getting Started with Data Mining Techniques

  • Problem statement
  • Similarity measures
  • Clustering
  • Dimensionality reduction
  • Supervised learning
  • Evaluation metrics

Building Collaborative Filters

  • Technical requirements
  • The framework
  • User-based collaborative filtering
  • Item-based collaborative filtering
  • Model-based approaches

Hybrid Recommenders

  • Technical requirements
  • Introduction
  • Case study and final project – Building a hybrid model

Who Benefits

This course is geared for Python experienced developers, analysts or others who are intending to learn the tools and techniques required in building various kinds of powerful recommendation systems (collaborative, knowledge and content based) and deploying them to the web.

Prerequisites

  • Basic to Intermediate IT Skills, with some prior Python exposure if able. Attendees without a programming background like Python may view labs as follow along exercises or team with others to complete them.
  • Good foundational mathematics or logic skills
  • Basic Linux skills, including familiarity with command-line options such as ls, cd, cp, and su