Developing and evaluating recommender systems

Abstract: In recent years, web has experienced a tremendous growth concerning users and content. As a result information overload problem has always been always one of the main discussion topics. The aim has always been to find the most desired solution in order to help users when they find it increasingly difficult to locate the accurate information at the right time. Recommender systems developed to address this need by helping users to find relevant information among huge amounts of data and they have now become a ubiquitous attribute to many websites. A recommender system guides users in their decisions by predicting their preferences while they are searching, shopping or generally surfing, based on their preferences collected from past as well as the preferences of other users. Until now, recommender systems has been vastly used in almost all professional e-commerce websites, selling or offering different variety of items from movies and music to clothes and foods. This thesis will present and explore different recommender system algorithms such as User-User Collaborative and Item-Item Collaborative filtering using open source library Apache mahout. Algorithms will be developed in order to evaluate the performance of these collaborative filtering algorithms. They will be compared and their performance will be measured in detail by using evaluation metrics such as RMSE and MAE and similarity algorithms such as Pearson and Loglikelihood.