CollaborativeFiltering

The Internet is becoming “smarter” every day. The video-sharing website that you frequently visit seems to know exactly what you will like, even before you have seen it. The online shopping cart holding your items almost magically figures out the one thing that you may have missed or intended to add before checking out. It’s as if these web services are reading your mind—or are they?

Turns out, predicting a user’s likes involves more math than magic. In this article we explore one of the many ways of building a recommendation engine that is both simple to implement and understand.