Our recommendation system

Now that we have our data in a Python graph, let’s go one step further and design a more robust recommendation process, typically carried out with graph data.

Let’s take on the role of a solutions engineer or data scientist and write a game recommendation system based on our Steam data. Recommendation systems are used heavily in customer-facing applications, to show the user a product that they may be interested in. Product recommendations are often based on what behaviorally similar users have played and purchased.

Generic MySQL to igraph methods

This time, we will write a set of reusable, generic methods to create an igraph graph from columns in a MySQL table. The functions will be designed to create a heterogeneous, bipartite, directed graph, given a set of column names.

Let’s start by writing a main function, mysql_to_graph(). The method will need to accept a MySQL table name, the table, source, and target column names...