Open-Source "Ratings & Recommendations" Software? 9
In an email from co-editor, Jamie:
"I researched this stuff for a possible project some years back. Not much has changed.
There isn't any open-source code out there that I know of, but, people have been writing masters' theses and dissertations about it for several years now. They can go search the literature if they're really interested. But there isn't just a perl module you can install to get this stuff...yet.
You should probably try these search terms:- 'recommender system'
- 'recommendation system'
'FireFly' is another one -- that was the name of some (fairly successful) recommendation software which was purchased by our favorite innovator, Microsoft, three years ago and repackaged as (surprise!) 'Passport.'
[And for those interested]...here's a promising link .
No. (Score:1)
Re:Hire someone (Score:2)
Re:No. (Score:1)
no, sorry, try -1 offtopic.
Collaborative filtering? (Score:2)
P.S.: the age of mana from VCs is long since over. Here's where I'd recommend you come up with something smarter than "we're running headlong up against Amazon with a recommendation system that we found somewhere on the internet" for your business plan if you're at all serious about this.
Don't know about "OpenSource" (Score:2)
Hire someone (Score:2)
Re:Hire someone (Score:2)
To be useful and valuable, the information does not have to be statistically valuable-- who needs to know that 97% of users thought that Slackware was a good distrobution with a stadard deviation of +/- 1% or that 15% of people recommeded PostgreSQL +/- 10%?
Rather the importance should be in delivering useful results to be incorporated in a web page.
Re:Hire someone (Score:2)
Yes, that would be trivially easy, but that's not what was being asked for here.
To my reading, the poster was looking for a system that would provide the most desirable items for a given user, based on that user's past ratings of other items.
So you need to model what that person likes and figure out how that correlates to what other people like.
If I like cheese and tomatoes, and you like cheese, tomatoes, and spinach, then presumably I might like spinach too. The system's confidence that I would like spinach grows in line with the following:
Not an easy problem at all. Especially when you want to optimize it for rapid matching.
Re:Hire someone (Score:4)
I don't know about that...
Last time I got involved in a project like this I was knee-deep in stats books before I knew it. Brought in some statisticians who were scratching their heads tuning formulas more than a page long. Finally the funding came through for something else and it all got shelved.
In order to have a workable system, you have to account for all sorts of scoring biases, results significance that changes with sample size, variations in attribute preference, and of course troublemakers who want to fuck with the ratings for one reason or another.