Crab: Recommender Systems in Python

Learn, Improve and Contribute

What: The Crab is a BSD-licensed project for building recommender systems using Python and SciPy. Its goals are to help beginners and specialists to build and evaluate customized recommender engines in an ease of use and computational performance environment.

Why: Recommender engines are the most immediately recognizable machine learning techniques in use today. We've all seen services or sites that attempt to recommend books or movies or articles baed on our past actions. They try to infer tastes and preferences and identify unknown items that are of interest. Several approaches have been proposed in several languages but for Python community there's a need for those tools, specially for easy-to-use and state-of-the-art libraries for this type of task. Python is being used with big data successfully and as result it enjoys a growing success in the scientific computing communities, with several python numerical computing libraries. We believe Crab might be a useful framework for scientists and beginners to start learning and even deploying their custom recommendation techniques using Python as the main programming language.

Ease of use: Crab tries to bridge the gap between academic research and general-purpose programming by being accessible to non-specialists and developers. This goal motivates the following choices:

• A strong focus on documentation and examples:
• Ease of installation by keep the dependencies low (only numpy and scipy) and limiting the use of compiled code
• Simple API avoiding the use of machine-learning jargon

PythonBrasil sprint organization

Why PythonBrasil: The conference PythonBrasil <http://pythonbrasil.org.br/> is considered one of the major Python meetups in Latin America. It is a traditional brazilian event hosted every year since 2007. This year it is in São Paulo. As the PythonBrazil gathers many python enthusiasts, it is a great opportunity for Crab project to gain new contributors.

Local organization: The sprint will be held during the PythonBrazil conference. Further information can be found at: https://github.com/muricoca/crab/wiki/UpcomingEvents

Places

• In São Paulo/SP - Brazil: Send an email to caraciol@gmail.com for further information about the place.
• On IRC (#muricoca on irc.freenode.net)