Can Myrrix be used for user-based collaborative filtering?

Question

Can I use Myrrix for user-to-user recommendations like I can with Apache Mahout? If yes, please describe, or give a link to a way to do so.

I wanted to use Myrrix for its easy-to-use REST API and because it's very fast and lightweight. I need to recommend to totally new users (new users, but they have 100 item preferences each) - the recommendToAnonymous of Myrrix could've proved very handy, but I'm not sure if I can use it if it doesn't allow user-to-user recommendations.

Answer 1

It depends on what you mean by user-to-user recommendations -- recommendations based on user-user similarity? No that is not how it works; it is based on matrix factorization. But that's just an implementation detail.

I think the question is rather, does it support the operations you want? If you want to recommend to new users, yes it can do that after just 1 data point for a user. Add the user-item pref via /preference, then just call /recommend. Or you can add all 100, then recommend. Or you can use /recommendToAnonymous, yes.

If you mean computing most similar users -- yes and no. No there is no direct API method for this. You will have to run a second model where items and users are flipped, and then compute most similar items.