I want to knock down some support for content based recommendation. And I want to solicit ideas about what this even means to its intended audience -- users.
I define it broadly as a recommender in which: - items have attributes (e.g. books have genres, titles, authors) rather than being completely opaque entities - users have affinities for attributes - users are recommended items with attributes they like I would narrow and specify this, in the context of Mahout, to have a collaborative filtering angle: - items have attributes, still - users have preferences for items (classic CF) - (therefore, users implicitly have affinities for attributes) - item similarity can be defined in terms of item attributes, in some way - users are recommended items that are similar to other items they like (item-based recommendation) - (therefore, users are recommended items with attributes they like) This is my spin on content based recommendation in Mahout. I define it as a special case of item-based recommendation. Thoughts? So, the idea is to provide some non-trivial framework for supporting item attributes, and defining similarity in terms of attributes. Thoughts on what that should look like? Sean
