I recently watched a session by Max Humber on building a recommender engine on O’Reilly. What I really liked about it was that he didn’t use the standard Movielens data. The problem with the standard datasets is that they omit the hardest part about any sort of machine learning or modeling: getting the data and formatting it to work properly in the model.
I wanted to build upon the recommender that he constructed using beer data. Beeradvocate is an excellent site with many, many beer reviews. The first step then is get some data down from that site and get it into a csv format that can be used in a simple recommender. As soon as I get that done, I’ll post the code and keep moving.