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Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by jamii on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:24AM (#3609135)
I've been working on something similar - https://github.com/jamii/springer-recommendations

All the open-source engines I've tried scale poorly. Since our input data already contains >200m interactions I suspect recommendify would struggle (from my quick reading it looks like the co-concurrence matrix is stored in redis ie in-memory).

The approach I'm leaning towards at the moment is collating the article->IPs and IP->articles tables in leveldb and then distributing read-only copies to each worker. Everything else can easily be partitioned by article id.

Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by jaylevitt on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:27PM (#3610725)
I can't tell from the README - is your data fairly wide? I'm playing with using Postgres's new K-Nearest-Neighbor support to calculate similarity on 20D cubes, but I suspect my approach won't work well for an arbitrary number of columns (i.e. users x products) unless you first do some sort of PCA or SVD to narrow it down, and it isn't optimized for binary ratings at all. I started writing it up here: http://parapoetica.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/feature-space-si...
Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by jamii on Monday February 20, 2012 @05:38AM (#3611990)
> ... is your data fairly wide?

Around 200m download logs, 2m articles, some million IP addresses. I suspect that interest in research papers is inherently high dimensional and dimensional reduction would probably damage the results.

I don't have much hardware to throw at it either. I just started looking at randomized algorithms - trying to produce a random walk on the download graph that links articles with probability proportional to some measure of similarity (probably cosine distance or Jaccard index).

Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by fraserharris on Sunday February 19, 2012 @03:51AM (#3608986)
Terrific readme
Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by joeblau on Sunday February 19, 2012 @09:51AM (#3609454)
+1 more for that awesome ReadMe. The project looks clean and simple.
Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by ghayes on Sunday February 19, 2012 @03:58AM (#3608993)
+1 for (albeit simple) time analysis
Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by steve19 on Sunday February 19, 2012 @04:19AM (#3609021)
How does this compare with other recommendation engines, such as the opensource EasyRec[0] ?

[0] http://easyrec.org/

Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by ambertch on Sunday February 19, 2012 @07:39AM (#3609221)
Paul, how does C fits into the picture? I don't see anything in the source for compiling native extensions, and the implementations src/recommendify.c calls look incomplete?

I am guessing you still working on the gem?

Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by sycr on Sunday February 19, 2012 @10:05AM (#3609476)
Oh man, this is just awesome. Thanks so much for making this open source - it's great to be able to pick apart the internals of something like this.
Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by chrismealy on Wednesday February 22, 2012 @12:30PM (#3621671)
Does any part of this involve taking the square root of something? Amazon's original similarities did that and I can't remember exactly how.
Re:Show HN: A distributed Recommendation Engine based on Red... by moe on Sunday February 19, 2012 @11:56AM (#3609687)
Oof. This is beautiful on so many levels.