Recommender Systems in R

Sat, 26 Oct 2019 20:59:29 +0200

A former WU-member, Michael Hahsler, created a really nice package called recommenderlab, which allows you to build collaborative filtering systems. But before you can use it, you have to install all required packages:

install.packages(c("recommenderlab", "dplyr", "readr"))

… and load them:

library(recommenderlab)
library(tibble)
library(dplyr)
library(readr)

I asked my students to answer some questions. One question was about their favourite TV series, which is a good example for a recommender system (Netflix for example does pretty much the same). So they filled out this survey and I generated a table by adding a new row for each student and a new column for each TV show. I put a 1 in the cell if the user likes the show and nothing if not. You can import such a table (CSV-format) using the following command (all columns are by default parsed as integers except user, which is a string). The file itself came from a course survey and is not published here, so you will have to substitute your own:

Recommender Systems on Christian Hotz-Behofsits

Recommender Systems in R