Crab: A Python Framework for Building Recommendation Engines

Hi all,

In this weekend I presented a lecture at the XII Python User Group Pernambuco Meeting about the framework I've been working on at these last months. The framework is called Crab and it is a Python library for building recommendation engines. Its main goal is to be an alternative for machine learning researchers and developers for use standard-of-the-art implemented recommendation algorithms, evaluate and extend it by building new techniques using the basic core provided by the framework.   

Me presenting the Crab : A Python framework for building recommendation engines

The framework has started in 2010, as a support toolkit for my master degree thesis about recommendation engines. I've implemented the Collaborative Filtering techniques as also the evaluation metrics used in recommendations (Precision, Recall, F1-Score, RMSE, etc). But since last month (April,2011) I decided to give the framework a shot to become more visible and bring more contributors for the project. The project became part of a Non-profitable organization called Muriçoca Labs, a team of  developers and researchers interested in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. We also decided to    migrate all the core of the project using the scientific libraries Numpy, Scipy and Matplotlib, since the speed and the legibility of the code were the main advantages of these toolkits.   

The project started last month and had its first sprint where the team is focused on rewriting all the code of the old crab to this new release as also make it a independent project member of the Scikit repository - Sub-projects of Scipy Framework and a sub-module of the Scikit-Learn  (a popular python framework for machine learning algorithms). 

We are quite excited and working harder! By the way the Crab framework is already in production providing the recommendations of the brazilian social network AtePassar.  We are with lot of ideas and features such as content based filtering algorithms, recommendations as services providing REST APIs and Databases Models Support.

If you are interested in the project and want to know how to join us or use our projects, please let me know and add a comment below and I will be glad to help you!  The project is at the beginning, but we are working harder to see it in action as a possible alternative for Python developers that want to work with this hot topic in the data mining and web services: Recommender Systems.

Below I provide the slides that I presented about the project at the lecture.

Crab - A Python Framework for Building Recommendation Systems

View more presentations from Marcel Caraciolo

Meet the Muriçoca Labs here  and the link for the Crab framework here.

Regards,

Marcel Caraciolo