Dynamic rankings in Rails

Question

general "how do I do this?" question.

Say, I have a Rails app where users can browse books. I want there to be a recommendations page that lists books recommended for that specific user based on an algorithm that integrates data from Facebook's Open Graph. A simplified version of this algorithm would look something like:

a(Number of your facebook friends that have liked this book) + b(total number of people that like this book)

Where a and b are weighting coefficients.

Where in rails would I calculate this formula to return the recommendations? Is there a gem that helps with creating dynamic rankings?

Any help would be great!

Answer 1

Welcome to a rabbit hole. Enjoy the fall!

You're generally talking about Support Vector Machines. Here's some decent starting points:

• Practical Machine Learning
• http://matthewkirk.com/presentations/Support-Vector-Machines-with-Jruby.pdf
• https://github.com/hexgnu/rmw-svm