Hello and welcome to this project! The purpose of this file is to give some guidance in how to access and use the movie recommender algorithm and what prerequisites you will need to have.
To read more about this project we suggest looking at the github pages page where you will be able to read about the considerations, limitations and challenges.
Note
The dataset used in this project is gathered from IMDB. Although IMDB claims on their website that they have an unbiased rating system, we do not have access to their algorithm and can’t validate the reliability of this claim. We want you to be aware of potential biases that exist within our algorithm. Research has shown that in general the rating "community" has a strong male perspective as men tend to write more movie reviews than women. As an example from our dataset we can see that all of the top 10 most occurring directors are male. You can read more about this on the Dataset page.
To run this application you will need to have: An IDE that can read python and JSON files A Python debugger Pandas installed
The examples below will be done in VS code but feel free to use whatever IDE you are comfortable with.
To download the repository to your VS code you can open a new folder with VS code and press “Clone Git Repository” and then simply paste the url from github into the searchbar at the top.
Once you have done this and have all the files in your IDE you will need to download pandas.
To do this you can open up a terminal with powershell and paste the following code:
python -m ensurepip --upgrade python -m pip install --upgrade pip python -m pip install pandas
You now have pandas!
Finally if you don't already have a python debugger go to "extensions"
Search for “python” in the search bar and get “Python” and “Python Debugger” by Microsoft. That is what we used.
Once you have downloaded the python debugger click on "theMovieRecommenderAlgorithm.py" in the "Scripts" folder and then click on the run button in the top right corner. Then click "Run Python File". This should run the file/ algorithm and you should be able to test it out by yourself by sending inputs through the console.
We hope these steps were helpful and that you enjoy using the algorithm!
Best regards, Grupp 2