Discovering matrix factorization
In this section, we'll learn what matrix factorization is, and how it can be used to build recommendation engines.
Matrix factorization represents a class of algorithms usually used to build recommendation engines. These algorithms are built on matrices that represent the interactions between users and items. In these kinds of matrices, the following occurs:
- Each user or customer is represented as a row.
- Each item or product corresponds to a column of the matrix.
- Each cell of the matrix is filled with a numeric value: the feedback.
This feedback represents a rating that a specific user has given to a specific item.
In the following screenshot, we can see an example of a matrix where the rows are the customers of a video streaming service and the columns are the films offered by the platform. Some of the cells contain a rating that ranges from 1 to 5: