What is a good recommendation?
Collaborative filtering is the workhorse powering the recommendations by Recommend.Games. Over the years, I’ve been asked every now and then how it works. So, I thought it’s high time I outlined the basic ideas behind our recommendation engine.
Let’s first take a step back and talk about recommendations in general. What is it we’re trying to achieve? The answer to this question is far from trivial, and it gets harder when you want to formalise its goals. Maybe a somewhat naïve approach would be to say that we want to recommend items that the user will like. But recommendations are as much about predicting what the user wants as what they didn’t even know they wanted. Sometimes the most “correct” answer is also the least useful: maybe our #1 recommendation is Wingspan and the user indeed would love to play it - but if they already knew about it, why recommend it in the first place?
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