Understanding recommender systems

In an ever-growing digital world, customers are often overwhelmed by the choices available and need assistance finding what they want. It comes as no surprise that their habits and preferences are valuable assets to overcome this hurdle. Both assist in identifying user needs and permit companies to promote new products and services at the right time and place. Nonetheless, with most of the services being predominately online, having direct access to your customers is challenging. So, what is the solution?

Let’s consider a few standard user inputs to answer this question, such as the number of stars awarded in an Amazon book review. Ratings provide a quality measure for the items in any online store. Similarly, the view count of a YouTube video is an engagement metric that can be used to recommend the same video to others. The number of views is an implicit indicator while rating scores are explicit. In both cases, however, an automatic system...