Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
2018
DOI
10.18122/cs_facpubs/147/boisestate
Abstract
Since 2010, we have built and maintained LensKit, an open-source toolkit for building, researching, and learning about recommender systems. We have successfully used the software in a wide range of recommender systems experiments, to support education in traditional classroom and online settings, and as the algorithmic backend for user-facing recommendation services in movies and books. This experience, along with community feedback, has surfaced a number of challenges with LensKit’s design and environmental choices. In response to these challenges, we are developing a new set of tools that leverage the PyData stack to enable the kinds of research experiments and educational experiences that we have been able to deliver with LensKit, along with new experimental structures that the existing code makes difficult. The result is a set of research tools that should significantly increase research velocity and provide much smoother integration with other software such as Keras while maintaining the same level of reproducibility as a LensKit experiment. In this paper, we reflect on the LensKit project, particularly on our experience using it for offline evaluation experiments, and describe the next-generation LKPY tools for enabling new offline evaluations and experiments with flexible, open-ended designs and well-tested evaluation primitives.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Information
Ekstrand, Michael D.. (2018). "The LKPY Package for Recommender Systems Experiments". Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations, .
Comments
This paper was presented at The REVEAL 2018 Workshop on Offline Evaluation for Recommender Systems.