Hi all, have a question re: tutorials... At my org we use Mahout primarily for recommendations - both eComm and offline for other purposes. I'm new to Mahout (~9 months of toying around) and honestly I never actually "touch" the code - I simply use what's "out-of-the-box" and occasionally ping the @user list for questions and always seem to get pointed in the right direction so that's been a huge help for us and I can't thank the community enough.
I've spent the past several months documenting what we've gone through to get our recommendation pipeline up and running but it comes from a more "business-y" angle. For instance, I have a section in our documentation explaining how we expanded the use of the recommender beyond item-level to include higher-level product groups/categories, replaced the notion of "users" with customers or groups of customers, etc. (i.e. some of the things MIA suggests can be used to expand the breadth of what one can accomplish with recommending things). I also include some information about how we actually apply this to business problems (i.e. driving recommendations to your sales force, integrating with eComm, using the recommender to quickly ID gaps in your category penetration, etc.). It took me a while to piece together everything we could do with recommendations from various blogs, MIA, the Mahout wiki, slideshare, my own experimentation, etc. and I kept hoping I'd find a consolidated source for "this is how you can start to apply Mahout's recommendation capabilities in a fairly traditional commercial organization" but never stumbled across a resource that fit the bill. MIA was great in getting me to think about what might be possible but finding real-world examples was tough. Personally, I would've loved to have something that gave me a little more in the "applied techniques" space that expanded on the basics of getting me in the right CLI syntax to kick off a recommendation job. My experience was/is that probably 30% of my time was spent learning how to get Mahout deployed/integrated with our Hadoop cluster, kickoff the relevant jobs, get the results into a useable format, etc. and 70% thinking about how best to bring this capability into the fold for driving business results. So, would it prove worthwhile to have something like this as a component of the Mahout wiki? If so, I'm happy to condense some of my documentation and send to the group for thoughts and potential inclusion. I'm not the guy you want helping fix bugs or cleaning up code but I spend my days with "boots on the ground" implementation of Mahout in a Fortune 15 organization and I have to believe there are others out there in my position looking for help on how to integrate Mahout into their operations. Best, Nick
