What are Recommender Systems?

What are Recommender Systems?

A Recommender System refers to a system that is capable of predicting the future preference of a set of items for a user, and recommend the top items. One key reason why we need a recommender system in modern society is that people have too much options to use from due to the prevalence of Internet. In the past, people used to shop in a physical store, in which the items available are limited. For instance, the number of movies that can be placed in a Blockbuster store depends on the size of that store. By contrast, nowadays, the Internet allows people to access abundant resources online. Netflix, for example, has an enormous collection of movies. Although the amount of available information increased, a new problem arose as people had a hard time selecting the items they actually want to see. This is where the recommender system comes in.
ref:https://towardsdatascience.com/recommender-system-a1e4595fc0f0#:~:text=A%20Recommender%20System%20refers%20to%20a%20system%20that%20is%20capable,and%20recommend%20the%20top%20items.&text=This%20is%20where%20the%20recommender%20system%20comes%20in.

Recommender systems or recommendation systems (sometimes replacing “system” with a synonym such as platform or engine) are a subclass of information filtering system that seek to predict the ‘rating’ or ‘preference’ that a user would give to an item.

Recommender systems have become extremely common in recent years, and are applied in a variety of applications. The most popular ones are probably movies, music, news, books, research articles, search queries, social tags, and products in general. However, there are also recommender systems for experts, collaborators, jokes, restaurants, financial services, life insurance, persons (online dating), and Twitter followers.