Providing personalized recommendations

If you run an e-commerce site, a feature that is nice for your customers to have is recommendations. Using the Recommendation Solution, you can easily add this. Utilizing Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, the API can be trained to recognize items that should be recommended.

There are two common scenarios for recommendations, as follows:

• Item-to-Item Recommendations (I2I): I2I is the scenario where certain items are often viewed after other items. Typically, this will be in the form of people who visited this item also visited this other item.
• Customer-to-Item Recommendations (U2I): U2I is the scenario where you utilize a customer's previous actions to recommend items. If you sell movies, for example, then you can recommend other movies based on a customer's previous movie choices.

The general steps to use the Recommendation Solution are as follows:

1. Deploy the template in Azure
2. Import the catalog data (the items in your e-commerce site)
3. Import usage...