Preprocessing the Book-Crossing dataset
We want to process the dataset for a particular task: recommending items, and more specifically using a collaborative filtering approach. Collaborative filtering is a technique used to make personalized recommendations to users. It is based on the idea that users who have similar preferences or behaviors are more likely to have similar interests. Collaborative filtering algorithms use this information to identify patterns and make recommendations to users based on the preferences of similar users.
This is different from content-based filtering, which is a recommendation approach that relies on the features of the items being recommended. It generates recommendations by identifying the characteristics of an item and matching them to the characteristics of other items that have been liked by the user in the past. Content-based filtering approaches are typically based on the idea that if a user likes an item with certain characteristics, they...
