Recommendation Systems Project: LSH, CF, and Amazon Reviews

This project focuses on the implementation and evaluation of recommendation systems using the Amazon Review datasets. The assignment is divided into two main tasks. The first task involves implementing the Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) algorithm using both Jaccard and Cosine similarity measures to identify similar products based on user ratings. The second task requires the implementation of a collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation system, including model-based, user-based, and item-based approaches, with the option of integrating LSH results for improved performance. The project requires the use of Spark RDDs, and the evaluation of the implemented systems involves computing precision, recall, and RMSE to assess their accuracy and effectiveness. Students are encouraged to optimize their systems and analyze the impact of LSH on the recommendation process. The project aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of different recommendation system techniques and their practical application using real-world datasets.

Assignment Overview
This assignment contains two parts. First, you will implement an LSH algorithm, using both
Cosine and Jaccard similarity measurement, to find similar products. Second, you will implement
a collaborative-filtering recommendation system. The datasets you are going to use are the
Amazon Review datasets. The task sections below explain the assignment instructions in detail.
The goal of the assignment is to make you understand how different types of recommendation
systems work and more importantly, try to find a way to improve the accuracy of the
recommendation system yourself.
Environment Requirements
Python: 2.7 Scala: 2.11 Spark: 2.2.1
IMPORTANT: We will use these versions to compile and test your code. If you use other
versions, there will be a 20% penalty since we will not be able to grade it automatically.
You can only use Spark RDD.
Submission Details
For this assignment you will need to turn in a Python, Java, or Scala program depending on your
language of preference.
Your submission must be a .zip file with name: <Firstname>_<Lastname>_hw3.zip. The structure of
your submission should be identical as shown below. The Firstname_Lastname_Description.pdf file
contains helpful instructions on how to run your code along with other necessary information as
described in the following sections. The OutputFiles directory contains the deliverable output files for
each problem and the Solution directory contains your source code.

Datasets
We are continually using Amazon Review data. This time we use the Amazon Instant Video
category. We have already transferred the string id of user and product to integers for your
convenience. You should download two files from Blackboard:
1. video_small_num.csv
2. video_small_testing_num.csv
Task1: LSH (50%)
LSH Algorithm
In this task, you will need to develop the LSH technique using the video_small_num.csv file. The
dataset is provided to you under the /data folder of the bundled.zip file of the assignment. The
goal of this task is to find similar products according to the ratings of the users. In order to solve
this problem, you will need to read carefully the sections 3.3 – 3.5 from Chapter 3 of the Mining
of Massive Datasets book.
In this problem, we will focus on 0-1 ratings rather than the actual ratings of the users. To be more
specific, if a user has rated a product, then his contribution to the characteristic matrix is 1 while if
he hasn’t rated a product his contribution is 0. Our goal is to identify similar products whose
Similarity is greater or equal to 0.5.
In task 1, you’re required to implement two approach using different similarity measurements:
1. Jaccard based LSH (30%)
Implementation Guidelines - Approach
The original characteristic matrix must be of size [users] x [products]. Each cell contains a 0 or
1 value depending on whether the user has rated the product or not. Once the matrix is built,
you are free to use any collection of hash functions that you think would result in a more
consistent permutation of the row entries of the characteristic matrix.
Some potential hash functions could be of type:
f(x)= (ax + b) % m
or
f(x) = ((ax + b) % p) % m
where p is any prime number and m is the number of bins.
You can use any value for the a, b, p or m parameters of your implementation.
Once you have computed all the required hash values, you must build the Signature Matrix. Once
the Signature Matrix is built, you must divide the Matrix into b bands with r rows each, where

bands x rows = n (n is the number of hash functions), in order to generate the candidate pairs.
Remember that in order for two products to be a candidate pair their signature must agree (i.e.,
be identical) with at least one band.
Once you have computed the candidate pairs, your final result will be the candidate pairs whose
Jaccard Similarity is greater than or equal to 0.5. After computing the final similar items, you
must compare your results against the provided ground truth dataset using the precision and
recall metrics. The ground truth dataset contains all the products pairs that have Jaccard
similarity above or equal to 0.5. The ground truth dataset is located under the /data folder of the
assignment’s bundled .zip file and named as video_small_ground_truth_jaccard.csv.
Example of Jaccard Similarity:
user1 user2 user3 user4
product1 0 1 1 1
product2 0 1 0 0
Jaccard Similarity (product1, product2) = #products_intersection / #products_union = 1/3
Execution Example
The program that you will implement should take two parameters as input and generate one file
as an output. The first parameter must be the location of the ratings.csv file and the second one
must be the path to the output file followed by the name of the output file. The name of
the output file must be Firstname_Lastname_SimilarProducts_Jaccard.txt. The content of
the file must follow the same directions of question 1 in the Questions & Grades Breakdown
section below. If your program does not generate this file or it does not follow the
specifications as described in the following section, there would be a penalty of 50%.
Java/Scala Execution Example:
Please use JaccardLSH as class name
Python Execution Example:
Grading:
In order to get full credit for this question you should have precision >= 0.9 and recall >= 0.8.
If not, then you will get partial credit based on the formula:
(Precision / 0.9) * 15 + (Recall / 0.8) * 15
And your run time should be less than 120 seconds, or there’ll be 20% penalty.
2. Cosine based LSH (20%)
Please refer to https://github.com/soundcloud/cosine-lsh-join-spark and use the library to implement.

You can clone the repository to your computer and learn from the existing code in Main.scala and
finish the task.
The screenshot below demonstrates the structure of this project. You ONLY need to submit your
*.scala file for this task. Please make sure to read input csv and write output result under
/data directory, which means your input path should be “data/video_small_num.csv” and
your output file path should be “data/Firstname_LastName_SimilarProducts_Cosine.txt”
Please also compare your results against the provided ground truth dataset using the precision and
recall metrics. The ground truth dataset contains all the products pairs that have cosine similarity
above or equal to 0.5. The ground truth dataset is located under the /data folder of the
assignment’s bundled .zip file, and named as video_small_ground_truth_cosine.csv.
Grading:
In order to get full credit for this question you should have precision >= 0.9 and recall >= 0.7.
If not, then you will get partial credit based on the formula:
(Precision / 0.9) * 10 + (Recall / 0.7) * 10
Result format:
1. A file that contains the pairs of similar products that your algorithm has computed
using LSH followed by their Jaccard similarity. (same for Cosine similarity)
Example Format:
product1, product2, Similarity12
product1, product3, Similarity13
…
productn, productk, Similaritynk
The file must be sorted ascending first by the left-hand side product and then sorted
ascending by the right-hand side product. For example, the first row on the above snippet
should be shorted firstly by product1 and secondly by product2.

2. For Similarity >= 0.5 compute the precision and recall for the similar products
that your algorithm has generated against the ground truth data file under the
data folder in the .zip file.
Expressions:
Precision = true positives / (true positives + false positives)
Recall = true positives / (true positives + false negatives)
Task2: Model-based CF/ User-based CF / Item-based CF Algorithms
(50%)
You are going to predict for video_small_testing_num.csv datasets mentioned above. In your code,
you can set the parameters yourself to reach better performance. You can make any improvement
to your recommendation system: speed, accuracy.
The video_small_testing_num.csv datasets are a subset of the video_small_num.csv, each having
the same columns as its parent. Your goal is to predict the ratings of every <userId> and
<productId> combination in the test files. You CANNOT use the ratings in the testing datasets to
train your recommendation system. Specifically, you should first extract training data from the
rating file downloaded from Amazon Review dataset using the testing data. Then by using the
training data, you will need to predict rate for products in the testing datasets. You can use the
testing data as your ground truth to evaluate the accuracy of your recommendation system.
Example:
Assuming video_small_num.csv contains 1 million records and the video_small_testing_num.csv
contains two records: (12345, 2, 3) and (12345, 13, 4). You will need to first remove the ratings of
user ID 12345 on product IDs 2 and 13 from video_small_num.csv. You will then use the
remaining records in the video_small_num.csv to train a recommendation system (1 million – 2
records). Finally, given the user ID 12345 and product IDs 2 and 13, your system should produce
rating predictions as close as 3 and 4, respectively.
After achieving the prediction for ratings, you need to compare your result to the correspond
ground truth and compute the absolute differences. You need to divide the absolute differences
into 5 levels and count the number of your prediction for each level as following:
>=0 and <1: 12345 //there are 12345 predictions with a < 1 difference from the ground truth
>=1 and <2: 123
>=2 and <3: 1234
>=3 and <4: 1234
>=4: 12
Additionally, you need to compute the RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) by using following
formula:
RMSE =
1
( . −.)
4
.

Where . is the prediction for product i, . is the true rating for product i, n is the total number of the products. Read the
Microsoft paper mentioned in class1 to know more about how to use RMSE for evaluating your recommendation system.
In task 2, you are required to implement:
1. Model-based CF recommendation system by using Spark MLlib. (20%)
You can only use Scala to implement this task. You can learn more about Spark MLlib by
this link: http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/mllib-collaborative-filtering.html
We will grade on this task based on your accuracy. If your RMSE is greater than the baseline
showing in the table below, there will be 20% penalty.
>=0 and <1 4679
>=1 and <2 2031
>=2 and <3 663
>=3 and <4 292
>=4 35
RMSE 1.306126814254818
2. User-based CF recommendation system by yourself. (30%)
Below is the base line for user-based CF. Both accuracy and time is measured. If your
RMSE or run time is greater than the base line, there’ll be 20% penalty each.
>=0 and <1 5178
>=1 and <2 1857
>=2 and <3 512
>=3 and <4 130
>=4 23
RMSE 1.10331546222
Time (sec) 200
3. Item-based CF integrating LSH result you got from task 1. (Bonus points: 10%)
In task 1, you’ve already found all the similar products pairs in the dataset. You need to use
them to implement an item-based CF. Also measure the performance of it as previous one
does. Comparing the result with CF without LSH and answering how LSH could affect the
recommendation system? No base line requirement for this one. If you successfully
implement it and have reasonable answer to the question, you can get the bonus points.
Execution Example
The first argument passed to our program (in the below execution) is the rating csv file. The second
input is the path to the testing csv. Following we present examples of how you can run your program
with spark-submit both when your application is a Java/Scala program or a Python script.
1Shani, G., & Gunawardana, A. (2011). Evaluating recommendation systems. In Recommender systems
handbook (pp. 257-297). Springer US.

A. Example of running a Java/Scala application with spark-submit:
Notice that the argument class of the spark-submit specifies the main class of your
application and it is followed by the jar file of the application.
You should use ModelBasedCF, UserBasedCF, and ItemBasedCF as your class
name for 1, 2, and 3 in task 2 respectively.
B. Example of running a Python application with spark-submit:
Result format:
1. Save the predication results in a txt file. The result is ordered by <userId> and <productId> in
ascending order.
Example Format:
user1, product2, prediction12
user1, product3, prediction13
…
usern, productk, predictionnk
2. Print the accuracy and run time information in terminal, and copy this value in your
description file.
>=0 and <1: 12345
>=1 and <2: 123
>=2 and <3: 1234
>=3 and <4: 1234
>=4: 12
RMSE: 1.23456789
Time: 123 sec
Description File
Please include the following content in your description file:
1. Mention the Spark version and Python version
2. Describe how to run your program for both tasks
3. The precision and recall for both Jaccard and Cosine based LSH in task 1.
4. Same baseline table as mentioned in task 2 to record your accuracy and run time of programs
in task 2
5. If you make any improvement in your recommendation system, please also describe it in your
description file.

Submission Details
Your submission must be a .zip file with name: <Firstname>_<Lastname>_hw3.zip
Please include all the files in the right directory as following:
1. A description file: <Firstname>_<Lastname>_desription.pdf
2. All Scala scripts:
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_task1_Jaccard.scala
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_task1_Cosine.scala
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_task2_ModelBasedCF.scala
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_task2_UserBasedCF.scala
*<Firstname>_<Lastname>_task2_ItemBasedCF.scala
3. A jar package for all Scala file: <Firstname>_<Lastname>_hw3.jar
If you use Scala for all tasks, please make all *.scala file into ONLY ONE
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_hw3.jar file and strictly follow the class name mentioned
above. And DO NOT include any data or unrelated libraries into your jar.
4. If you use Python, then all python scripts: (Model-Based CF and Cosine-based LSH can
only use Scala, please pack them into <Firstname>_<Lastname>_hw3.jar and follow the
class naming convention as well)
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_task1_Jaccard.py
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_task2_UserBasedCF.py
*<Firstname>_<Lastname>_task2_ItemBasedCF.py
5. Required result files for task1 & 2:
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_ SimilarProducts_Jaccard.txt
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_ SimilarProducts_Cosine.txt
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_ModelBasedCF.txt
<Firstname>_<Lastname>_UserBasedCF.txt
*<Firstname>_<Lastname>_ItemBasedCF.txt
* are required files for bonus points.
Grading Criteria:
1. If your programs cannot run with the commands you provide, your submission will be
graded based on the result files you submit, and there will be an 80% penalty
2. If the files generated are not sorted based on the specifications, there will be 20% penalty.
3. If your program generates more than one file, there will be 20% penalty.
4. If the running time is greater than the base line, there’ll be 20% penalty for each part as
mentioned above.
5. If your prediction result files miss any records, there will be 30% penalty
6. If you don’t provide the source code, especially the Scala scripts, there will be 20%
penalty.
7. You can use your free 5-day extension.
8. There will be 10% bonus if you use Scala for the entire assignment.