Bookdown project for partial fufilment of Harvard 125.9x "Data Science: Capstone" requirements. Builds and evaluates recommender systems for the MovieLens dataset. This was split into a main and valiation set using a fixed seed as part of the project specifications.
An Rcpp implementation of Simon Funk's matrix factorization algorithm was applied to the rating residuals after user, movie, genre, and time-based biases were removed. The final RMSE (root mean squared error) of the developed model as compared against the validation set was:
compared to a target RMSE of 0.86490 set by the course.