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Recommender System Primer

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Total cards: 12•Content version: v4•Public deck•Updated: 8/1/2026

Card preview (12)

#1
Front (Question)

What data does collaborative filtering use?

Back (Answer)

Only uses Users’ history of ordering or rating items

#2
Front (Question)

What are the data sources that can be used for a recommender system? (3)

Back (Answer)

• Users’ demographic information (e.g., age, gender, location) • Items’ attributes (e.g., price, category) • Users’ history of ordering or rating items

#3
Front (Question)

What do we know about data for collaborative filtering?

Back (Answer)

Very sparse

#4
Front (Question)

What are the representations of the collaborative filtering problem?

Back (Answer)

• User-user approach: estimate a user’s rating of an item by finding “similar” users and then looking at their ratings for that item. • Item-item approach: estimate a user’s rating of an item by finding similar items and then looking at that user’s rating of these similar items. • Matrix factorization: construct two low-rank matrices that approximate the observed entries of X.

#5
Front (Question)

What’s The task of collaborative filtering?

Back (Answer)

“fill in” the missing values (i.e., the predicted user ratings) based on the existing ratings

#6
Front (Question)

How do you convert a dataframe to a Numpy matrix?

Back (Answer)

df.to_numpy()

#7
Front (Question)

In the user-user approach, how is the similarity weight calculated?

Back (Answer)

Two common options: • Pearson correlation • Cosine similarity

#8
Front (Question)

• What’s a drawback of the user-user and item-item approaches? • How do you solve it?

Back (Answer)

• Can’t keep the user-rating matrix in sparse format, which does not scale well with a large number of users / items. • Use matrix factorization.

#9
Front (Question)

What’s an advantage of the matrix factorization approach?

Back (Answer)

We don’t need to break the sparsity of the user ratings matrix?

#10
Front (Question)

What is this? “singularity issues with matrix inverses”

Back (Answer)

#11
Front (Question)

• What is alternating least squares? • What’s an important point about it?

Back (Answer)

• • It’s feasible with sparse matrices, which can considerably reduce runtime and memory usage.

#12
Front (Question)

What’s matrix factorization?

Back (Answer)

This approach aims to approximate the observed entries in X as a product of two lower-rank matrices