Project Over

I finished up my project last Monday with my senior seminar presentation.

I wasn't able to investigate everything I had planned on, mostly because it took longer than I expected.  I may try and work on it after I get out of school if I have time.

I did try a couple modifications to BRISMF.  First was using a user based neighborhood correction instead of item based.  This gave a little improvement, but pretty much trivial at the cost of about 4 hours additional prediction time.  I tried a couple of other things, but to no better success.

But I did end up with a good idea of how these algorithms work, and how recommender systems in general behave.  Hopefully I can work a little more on this later.

NSVD1 Failure

I went through my NSVD1 code many times, rewriting it completely four or five times, modifying it countless times, but never beating that 1.013. I even redid the math in that paper to make sure there weren't typos, and I don't have time to try and figure that out anymore.

With how far through the semester I am now, I don't have time to try any other algorithms, which is very dissapointing but I'll live. So the remainder of my time is going to spent on optimizing the BRISMF code that I already have and try and squeeze as much out of that as possible before I write my paper.

NSVD1 Grr...

So I tried to work on Gravity's training algorithm for Patarek's NSVD1 recommender.  And utterly failed.  I'm eathier reading it wrong, typing wrong, or not understanding the notation, but it's supposed to give me a RMSE of 0.9344, but mine has gone between. 1.013 and 2 something.  Yeah...

So I'm going to be redoing that one.  Hopefully after getting that working, I can do the Hybrid and then finally get on to a few of my own modifications.  I only need to figure out what they should be.