Hi Saikat, Great that you want to work on the ALS code. I think it is very important to make it easier to use, ideally no knowledge of the papers and formulas should be necessary.
As you know, the ALS code has a hyperparameter lambda that needs to be tuned in order to get a good factorization. Are you familiar with grid search and cross validation? It would be awesome to add some tooling for them to Mahout that helps users to easily find a good lambda. Another important new feature would be to check the training error of the factorization during the computation to make it automatically detect convergence. Thereby users would not have to give the number of iterations to execute as parameter. What do you think, does this sound reasonable to you? Best, Sebastian On 08.06.2013 01:15, Saikat Kanjilal wrote: > Sebastien et al, > Per the latest comments on mahout-974 I'd like to get a deeper understanding > on what future improvements or architectural changes are desired on the ALS > subsection of the codebase. I'd love to help with the development efforts on > this codebase and on the clustering subsection as well. > > Regards > > Sent from my iPhone >
