readAlike

Overview

readAlike is a book recommendation system that provides similar books to a given input book. The system leverages multiple techniques, including TF-IDF vectorization, Sentence-BERT embeddings, and Approximate Nearest Neighbors (ANN) for generating content-based book recommendations based on title, description, author, and category data.

How to Run

To run the recommendation engine:

1. Open the command line and execute pip install -r requirements.txt
2. Execute main.py. Given an example book, the program will print the top five recommended books based on three methods: TF-IDF, SBERT, and ANN.

Project Structure

1. Classes

• preprocessing/: Manages data preprocessing.
  • Preprocessor: Handles data cleaning and formatting from a CSV file of book data.
• core/: Contains the core modules for recommendation.
  • Library and Book: Models the library of books and individual book data.
  • Vectorizer: Converts book text data into numerical vectors using TF-IDF and Sentence-BERT.
  • DimensionalityReducer: Reduces the dimensionality of TF-IDF vectors using Truncated SVD.
  • Ann: Creates an Approximate Nearest Neighbors model for efficient similarity search.
  • Recommender: Main recommendation engine that integrates the above components to provide recommendations.

2. Key Components

• config.py: Configuration file with column names for title, description, authors, and categories.
• main.py: Main entry point for running the recommendation pipeline.

Program Flow

1. Preprocessing: The Preprocessor class reads the dataset and performs data cleaning.
2. Library Initialization: Library is initialized with the cleaned dataset, storing each book as a Book object.
3. Vectorization: Vectorizer creates TF-IDF and Sentence-BERT embeddings for each book.
4. Dimensionality Reduction: DimensionalityReducer reduces TF-IDF embeddings for optimized ANN performance.
5. ANN Construction: Ann constructs an ANN model based on the reduced vectors.
6. Recommendation: Recommender classifies recommendations into TF-IDF, SBERT, and ANN-based results, outputting top similar books.

Classes and Methods

Preprocessor

• Attributes:
  • df: DataFrame containing cleaned book data.
• Methods:
  • preprocess_data(): Cleans and formats the data.
  • drop_items_with_short_entries(), drop_duplicates(), convert_strings_into_lists(): Helper functions to clean the dataset.

Library

• Attributes:
  • books: List of Book objects.
• Methods:
  • get_combined_data(): Concatenates title, description, authors, and categories into a single string per book.
  • get_book_idx(): Retrieves the index of a book within the library.

Book

• Attributes:
  • title, description, authors, categories: Fields describing the book.
• Methods:
  • get_combined_data(): Combines title, description, authors, and categories into a single string.

Vectorizer

• Attributes:
  • tfidf_matrix: Sparse matrix of TF-IDF vectors.
  • sbert_embeddings: Sentence-BERT embeddings for each book.
• Methods:
  • tfidf_vectorize(): Vectorizes a book using TF-IDF.
  • sbert_vectorize(): Vectorizes a book or library using SBERT.

DimensionalityReducer

• Attributes:
  • reduced_matrix: Dimensionality-reduced version of the TF-IDF matrix.
• Methods:
  • reduce(): Reduces a TF-IDF vector to the lower dimension.

Ann

• Attributes:
  • ann_indices: ANN model for similarity search.
• Methods:
  • get_nearest_neighbors_by_index(), get_nearest_neighbors_by_vector(): Retrieves nearest neighbors by item index or vector.

Recommender

• Attributes:
  • lib: Library of books.
  • vectorizer: Vectorizer instance.
  • reducer: Dimensionality reducer instance.
  • ann: ANN instance.
• Methods:
  • recommend(): Provides top recommendations based on TF-IDF, SBERT, and ANN.