should I use mahout for this?

Question

I want to recommend items that are tagged and are categorized into three price categories (cheap, regular and expensive). I know that with Mahout recommendation could be achieved but here's why I don't know how to use it.

Mahout is based on the other users opinion but all of the new items that I want to recommend are just the new ones that don't have any preferences set yet.

Is Mahout the right tool for this? Is this content-based? (which mahout don't support yet????) or should I use classification?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Since I've never built any recommender system - do not take this answer very seriously (no-one has answered it, so I try)

recommendation system has to be built on some already known (or partially known data). If you have only new (unseen) data there is only possibility to use some clustering algorithm in order to build some clusters.

And if those clusters would be ok, they can be used for training some recommendation system.

Mahout is just a tool which implement various ML methods. You can use other tools like Weka, R, ...

Answer 2

If you have no data at all about a new user, there's really nothing you can do to make recommendations, no matter what you do. There is zero input that would differentiate the person from anyone else.

Good systems should however be able to do something reasonable after the first input is available.

This is not a classifier problem by nature, no. It is also not a clustering tool, other answers notwithstanding.

The price categories are not core to any rec process you would use. You have other data presumably, what is it? That's important.

Finally whether or not to use Mahout depends on taste. You would use it if you want to use Java and Hadoop. And in turn you would only consider Hadoop if you had very large input, and few people have that much data (like >10M data points at least).

(Well, not quite -- my recommender pieces in Mahout pre-date Hadoop and are for on-line, smaller-scale applications. You might indeed be interested in this, if you are working in Java.)