Part I - Recommender Systems

Those people who think they know
everything are a great annoyance
to those of us who do.

Isaac Asimov

This part consists of two chapters. The first is theoretical, in which necessary concepts are explained regarding the field of recommender systems. We begin by presenting the development of the field, from its roots in information retrieval to where it is today, a field of its own, influenced by many other. Historical important events and work done by others are presented. A detailed analysis of various recommendation techniques are given and a brief discussion of problems and challenges regarding some of these techniques are presented. The chapter ends with a presentation of some well known websites and how they use recommender systems on their sites.

In chapter two, recommendation techniques that we have chosen to implement are evaluated and the results discussed. Different measures for evaluating recommender systems are presented and used. All recommendation techniques are presented in clearly written pseudo code.