Any of the Spark MLlib ALS recommenders in the PIO template gallery support 
ratings.

However I must warn that ratings are not very good for recommendations and none 
of the big players use ratings anymore, Netflix doesn’t even display them. The 
reason is that your 2 may be my 3 or 4 and that people rate different 
categories differently. For instance Netflix found Comedies were rated lower 
than Independent films. There have been many solutions proposed and tried but 
none have proven very helpful.

There is another more fundamental problem, why would you want to recommend the 
highest rated item? What do you buy on Amazon or watch on Netflix? Are they 
only your highest rated items. Research has shown that they are not. There was 
a whole misguided movement around ratings that affected academic papers and 
cross-validation metrics that has fairly well been discredited. It all came 
from the Netflix prize that used both. Netflix has since led the way in 
dropping ratings as they saw the things I have mentioned.

What do you do? Categorical indicators work best (like, dislike)or implicit 
indicators (buy) that are unambiguous. If a person buys something, they like 
it, if the rate it 3 do they like it? I buy many 3 rated items on Amazon if I 
need them. 

My advice is drop ratings and use thumbs up or down. These are unambiguous and 
the thumbs down can be used in some cases to predict thumbs up: 
https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/mahout-spark-correlated-cross-occurences/ 
<https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/mahout-spark-correlated-cross-occurences/>
 This uses data from a public web site to show significant lift by using “like” 
and “dislike” in recommendations. This used the Universal Recommender.


On Nov 10, 2017, at 5:02 AM, Noelia Osés Fernández <[email protected]> wrote:


Hi all,

I'm new to PredictionIO so I apologise if this question is silly.

I have an application in which users are rating different items in a scale of 1 
to 5 stars. I want to recommend items to a new user and give her the predicted 
rating in number of stars. Which template should I use to do this? Note that I 
need the predicted rating to be in the same range of 1 to 5 stars.

Is it possible to do this with the ecommerce recommendation engine?

Thank you very much for your help!
Noelia






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