Matrix Factorization: A Simple Tutorial and Implementation in

There  is probably no need to say that there is too much information on the Web nowadays. Search engines help us a little bit. What is better is to have something interesting recommended to us automatically without asking. Indeed, from as simple as a list of the most popular bookmarks on Delicious, to some more personalized recommendations we received on Amazon, we are usually offered recommendations on the Web.

Recommendations can be generated by a wide range of algorithms. While user-based or item-based collaborative filtering methods are simple and intuitive, matrix factorization techniques are usually more effective because they allow us to discover the latent features underlying the interactions between users and items. Of course, matrix factorization is simply a mathematical tool for playing around with matrices, and is therefore applicable in many scenarios where one would like to find out something hidden under the data.

In this tutorial, we will go through the basic ideas and the mathematics of matrix factorization, and then we will present a simple implementation in Python. We will proceed with the assumption that we are dealing with user ratings (e.g. an integer score from the range of 1 to 5) of items in a recommendation system.

 

Table of Contents:

• Basic Ideas
• The mathematics of matrix factorization
• Regularization
• Implementation in Python
• Further Information
• Source Code
• References

 

detail see: http://www.quuxlabs.com/blog/2010/09/matrix-factorization-a-simple-tutorial-and-implementation-in-python/