Introduction to Recommender Systems (Coursera)

Introduction to Recommender Systems (Coursera)
Recommender systems have changed the way people find products, information, and even other people. They study patterns of behavior to know what someone will prefer from among a collection of things he has never experienced. The technology behind recommender systems has evolved over the past 20 years into a rich collection of tools that enable the practitioner or researcher to develop effective recommenders. We will study the most important of those tools, including how they work, how to use them, how to evaluate them, and their strengths and weaknesses in practice.

The algorithms we will study include content-based filtering, user-user collaborative filtering, item-item collaborative filtering, dimensionality reduction, and interactive critique-based recommenders. The approach will be hands-on, with six week projects, each of which will involve implementation and evaluation of some type of recommender.

In addition to topical lectures, this course includes interviews and guest lectures with experts from both academia and industry.