I recommend buying Mahout in Action. It's a Manning Early Access Program publication.
Sean Owen has been helping me work through some of the code examples. Cheers Niall On 16 December 2010 10:35, Niels Basjes <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm an experienced developer yet a complete newbie when it comes to > the type of functionality Mahout offers. > I do have some experience in designing and writing MapReduce jobs in > Hadoop so I understand enough of the base platform that is used. > > I want to investigate and experiment with both the item-item and > user-item recommenders in Mahout. > The problem I have is that I'm having a hard time finding a good > overview of the capabilities of the various algorithms. > Most Wikipedia articles immediately dive into the underlying > mathematical foundations instead of the practical implications I'm > looking for. > I've also not been able to find what I'm looking for in the Mahout > Wiki/Confluence. > > Putting it simply I'm looking for a comprehensive overview of > - the kind of things you can and cannot do with the various algorithms > that are available in Mahout. > - can it handle both "Implicit" and "Explicit" ratings. > - can I 'age' the relevance of the (implicit) ratings? I.e. > Recommendations should change with the changing taste. > - how does it handle in long tail situations (with millions of > items most are only viewed/rated very infrequently) > - what are the scaling properties of the algorithms. > - is it always batch or can I do real-time incremental updates > with new ratings? > - can I preprocess a daily dataset and then combine the daily sets > into "what I need"? > > Thanks for any info you can point me to. > > -- > Best regards, > > Niels Basjes > -- Niall Riddell *xSpace Analytics Ltd* * ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * T: +44 161 408 3830 M:+44 778 696 3830 Skype: niall.riddell * ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ *
