[mlpack] [GSoc2013] Interested in developing collaborative filtering package

[Nilesh Chakraborty]

Hi,

I am a 3rd year undergraduate student of computer science, pursuing my
B.Tech degree at RCC Institute of Information Technology. I am fairly good
in C++, and working on brushing it up for this project, and proficient in
Java, PHP and C#.

Among the project ideas on the GSoC 2013 ideas page, the one particular
idea that seemed really interesting to me is developing a collaborative
filtering package<http://www.mlpack.org/trac/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas#Collaborativefilteringpackage>for
mlpack. I want to work on it.

I am passionate about data mining, big data and recommendation engines,
therefore this idea naturally appeals to me a lot. I have experience with
building music and people recommendation systems, and have worked with
Myrrix and Apache Mahout. I recently designed and implemented such a
recommendation system and deployed it on a live production site, where I'm
interning at, to recommend Facebook users to each other depending upon
their interests.

I am familiar with a few collaborative filtering algorithms and familiar
with the Mahout APIs. Mahout contains a whole bunch of collaborative
filtering algorithm implementations in org.apache.mahout.cf.taste (here is
a quick overview :
https://cwiki.apache.org/MAHOUT/recommender-documentation.html). Myrrix (
https://code.google.com/p/myrrix-recommender/) focuses on matrix
factorization through Alternate Least Squares - it's fast, and it
eliminates the cold start problem where the recommender has too little data
to provide any useful recommendations.

I have since long searched for good C++ libraries for collaborative
filtering but to no avail. Having something like this in mlpack will be
fabulous. I can use Mahout and Myrrix code among other things as
implementation references, since Mahout is easily the most "complete" CF
library around.

I browsed around the source and checked out the mlpack API for available
methods. Please let me know what should be my next course of action, what I
can do to dig in, get myself acquainted.

Please share your views and do ask me if you have any questions. :-)

Cheers,
Nilesh

-- 
A quest eternal, a life so small! So don't just play the guitar, build one.
You can also email me at contact at nileshc.com or visit my
website<http://www.nileshc.com/>
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