Business understanding and recommendations
This business case is a joke, literally. Maybe it is more appropriate to say a bunch of jokes as we will use the Jester5k data from the recommenderlab package. This data consists of 5,000 ratings on 100 jokes sampled from the Jester Online Joke Recommender System. It was collected between April 1999 and May 2003, and all the users have rated at least 36 jokes (Goldberg, Roeder, Gupta, and Perkins, 2001). Our goal is to compare the recommendation algorithms and select the best one.
As such, I believe it is important to lead off with a statistical joke to put one in the proper frame of mind. I'm not sure of how to properly provide attribution for this one, but it is popular all over the Internet.
A statistician's wife had twins. He was delighted. He rang the minister who was also delighted. "Bring them to church on Sunday and we'll baptize them", said the minister. "No", replied the statistician. "Baptize one. We'll keep the other as a control."
