Implementing and designing systems that make suggestions to users are among the most popular and essential machine learning applications available. Whether you want customers to find the most appealing items at your online store, videos to enrich and entertain them, or news they need to know, recommendation systems (RecSys) provide the way.
In this practical book, authors Bryan Bischof and Hector Yee illustrate the core concepts and examples to help you create a RecSys for any industry or scale. You'll learn the math, ideas, and implementation details you need to succeed. This book includes the RecSys platform components, relevant MLOps tools in your stack, plus code examples and helpful suggestions in PySpark, SparkSQL, FastAPI, and Weights & Biases.
You'll learn:
The data essential for building a RecSys How to frame your data and business as a RecSys problem Ways to evaluate models appropriate for your system Methods to implement, train, test, and deploy the model you choose Metrics you need to track to ensure your system is working as planned How to improve your system as you learn more about your users, products, and business case
About the Authors
Dr. Bryan Bischof is the Head of Data Science at Weights and Biases, and an adjunct professor in the Rutgers Master of Business and Analytics program where he teaches Data Science. He has previously built recommendation systems for clothing (at Stitch Fix), and built the world's first recommendation system for coffee (at Blue Bottle Coffee). His research interests are in geometric methods for ML, including higher order graph methods and topological features. His data visualization work appeared in the popular book The Day it Finally Happens by Mike Pearl. His Ph.D. is in pure mathematics.
Hector Yee is a Staff Software engineer at Google, where he has worked on multiple projects including creating the first content based ranker on Image Search, the self driving car perception, and writing the YouTube recommender system. He has won a technical Emmy for his work on personalized video ranking technology. He has an M.S. in computer graphics.
