Building a Sporting Goods Recommendation System

Sammanfattning: This thesis report describes an attempt to build a recommender system for recommending sporting goods in an e-commerce setting, using the customer purchase history as the input dataset. Two input datasets were considered, the item purchases dataset and the item-category dataset. Both the datasets are implicit, that is not explicitly rated by the customer. The data is also very sparse that very few users have purchased more than a handful of the items featured in the dataset. The report describes a method for dealing with both the implicit datasets as well as addressing the problem of sparsity. The report introduces SVD (Single Value Decomposition) with matrix factorization as a implementation for recommendation systems. Specifically implementations in the Apache Mahout machine learning framework.