
Introduction to Recommender Systems - swGooF
https://www.coursera.org/course/recsys
======
ghc
I can't judge the coursera course, but for anyone who is interested in this
field and wants a gentle introduction, I high recommend _Programming
Collective Intelligence_
([http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do)).
It covers many of the types of recommender systems that the coursera course is
likely to cover, and comes with a lot of nice Python code examples.

It's highly useful knowledge too. I ran across so many startups that needed
recommender systems that I launched a company called Algorithmic.ly
([http://algorithmic.ly](http://algorithmic.ly)) to help companies without the
expertise integrate recommendation systems and other types of algorithms into
their projects.

~~~
arms
I was about to buy PCI a few days ago, but was worried that the information
may be out of date, considering it was published six years ago. Do you think
most of the material is still pertinent?

~~~
kops
Go for it. It's a great book and except for references to friendster as the
big social network and facebook a newbie, nothing else seemed dated to me.
Most of the APIs used in the book are still pretty much available except
probably(??) delicious API.

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eldog_
I'd be interested in knowing how much deep learning is changing the algorithms
used in this field, given the performance of restricted boltzmann machines on
the netflix data set
[http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hinton/absps/netflixICML.pdf](http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hinton/absps/netflixICML.pdf).

~~~
colincsl
I am surprised that there is no mention of this in the course syllabus -- in
fact it looks like a lot of recent techniques that are missing. They don't
even talking about LSA(/SVD)-based methods until the end of the course.

~~~
jere
Dumb, general question: should it really be a surprise that an Introduction
course doesn't use all the recent techniques?

~~~
colincsl
I guess I often assume that topics classes like these assume some sort of
background in machine learning. Perhaps that's not the case.

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riggins
coursera is killing me with courses I want to take.

~~~
DannoHung
I just wish you could take the classes at your own pace. I'm getting very
little out of the "certifications" or whatever. And the TA's/Discussion forums
tend towards pretty useless because of how disorganized they are.

~~~
srom
Download the resources and you'll be able to take the class at your own pace.
There are several tools for that purpose on github. e.g this one:
[https://github.com/dgorissen/coursera-
dl](https://github.com/dgorissen/coursera-dl)

As a special gift, it's allow you to archive the courses for later review.

~~~
DannoHung
Mainly I just want the graders to stay up. I've taken 2 programming courses
and having the auto-grader feedback really helps in figuring out how I'm doing
assignments incorrectly.

~~~
pallandt
I think the main reason why any reasonably complex grader is not allowed to
run after the course has officially finalized is cost(s).

While for users it's free to take the course, the offering company probably
has to pay fees to whatever IaaS they're using to run the grader(s). I would
imagine to make it 'cost-effective' for their purposes, they'd be interested
in as many people as possible benefiting from the grader's functionality if
they're being charged by the hour for example or some other block-allocation
unit.

I would suggest giving Udacity a try as well. Most of their courses do not
have deadlines.

For example, here is a great course they offer on web development:
[https://www.udacity.com/course/cs253](https://www.udacity.com/course/cs253) ,
co-authored by one of the Hipmunk and Reddit creators.

~~~
DannoHung
I'll take "Features I'd be Willing to Pay For" for $100 please, Alex.

------
mark_l_watson
If you want a quick start without taking a class, install the Apache Mahout
project - one of the Hadoop map-reduce examples is a recommendation system.
You can hack away, and run on Elastic MapReduce if you need to scale.
([https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Recommend...](https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Recommender+Documentation))

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javindo
Interesting anecdote: A graduate of my university works for Google who
originally had a very complex "machine learning pipeline" for the product
recommendations but he has since re-implemented the feature in, as he calls
it, a "much simpler bloom filter algorithm".

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victorhooi
Hmm, seems interesting = I'm currently doing the Machine Learning one also via
Coursera, run by Andrew Ng, and it's good gentle introduction to the subject.

It's a shame we can't view the course content for this one earlier...haha.

~~~
pallandt
I may be wrong, but I think it's the 1st time the course is being offered, I
don't personally remember seeing it before in their course list.

~~~
cgag
I think that was one of the first courses they offered actually.

~~~
pallandt
I think you're probably confusing it with something similarly named. See
[http://www.cs.umn.edu/news/news.php?id=1293](http://www.cs.umn.edu/news/news.php?id=1293)
which confirms it's being offered for the 1st time.

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oneeyedpigeon
I couldn't possibly recommend a site that _requires_ javascript to display
_any_ content whatsoever.

~~~
jwr
Why not? JavaScript has become a part of the web, just as much as HTML and
CSS. You might as well shun sites that use the <ul> tag, or CSS to style
content.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
JavaScript should certainly be used to enhance content and ad functionality.
But the core content should always be available without JS, since not all
consumers of that content will have JS enabled, or be able to interpret it.

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axansh
Thanks coursera.

Thank you very much.

Looking forward for this course.

You save my some $$$ :) Will surely donate you.

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arek2
I'll drop a link to my (non-free) e-book: [http://arek-
paterek.com/book/](http://arek-paterek.com/book/)

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fmela
So many great online courses, and so little time!

