Yes there are about five types of recommenders in the project currently -- user-based, item-based, slope-one, clustering-based, and one SVD-based implementation.
The difference between user-based and item-based isn't a question of including stuff like demographic information. So what you're after is not quite combining user-based and item-based approaches (though separately, that is interesting). What rating info could do is allow you to create a different, or better, similarity metric rather than one based purely on rating data, such as PearsonCorrelationSimilarity. Just write an implementation of UserSimilarity that reads your demographic info, and for any two user IDs, can return some notion of similarity based on that. Then you just plug that into a user-based recommender. Your implementation could be some kind of hybrid, too, between a similarity computed from ratings and one from demographics. See how averaging those two works. Plenty of possibilities here. On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 12:18 PM, michal shmueli <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I was playing with the examples and the demo, and to my best understanding, > the recommendation is based on either "user-based" or "item-based". For > example, the groupLens demo only looks on ratings but not on users data > (i.e. demographics). > > I have 2 files, one for users and one for their ratings. Is there a way to > combine them both and get better recommendation ? > > I'll appreciate if you can point me to such an example. > > thanks, > Michal >
