Hi Sean and Jeff, I looked at the formulas and I see your point that the computation is the same for input series with a mean of zero, thank you for the detailed feedback on this.
However, I'm a little bit confused now, let me explain why I thought that this additional similarity implementation would be necessary: Three weeks ago, I submitted a patch computing the cosine item similarities via map-reduce (MAHOUT-362), which is how I currently fill my database table of precomputed item-item-similarities. Some days ago I needed to precompute lots of recommendations offline via org.apache.mahout.cf.taste.hadoop.pseudo.RecommenderJob and didn't want to connect my map-reduce code to the database. So I was in need of a similarity implementation that would give me the same results on the fly from a FileDataModel, which is how I came to create the CosineItemSimilarity implementation. So my point here would be that if the code in org.apache.mahout.cf.taste.hadoop.similarity.item does not center the data, a non-distributed implementation of that way of computing the similarity should be available too, or the code in org.apache.mahout.cf.taste.hadoop.similarity.item should be changed to center the data. You stated that centering the data "adjusts for a user's tendency to rate high or low on average" which is certainly necessary when you collect explicit ratings from your users. However in my usecase (a big online-shopping platform) I unfortunately do not have explicit ratings from the users, so I chose to interpret certain actions as ratings (I recall this is called implicit ratings in the literature), e.g. a user putting an item into their shopping basket as a rating of 3 or a user purchasing an item as a rating of 5, like suggested in the "Making Recommendations" chapter" of "Programming Collective Intelligence" by T. Searagan. As far as I can judge (to be honest my mathematical knowledge is kinda limited) there are no different interpretations of the rating scala here as the values are fixed, so I thought that a centering of the data would not be necessary. Regards, Sebastian Sean Owen (JIRA) schrieb: > [ > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAHOUT-387?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel > ] > > Sean Owen updated MAHOUT-387: > ----------------------------- > > Status: Resolved (was: Patch Available) > Assignee: Sean Owen > Fix Version/s: 0.3 > Resolution: Won't Fix > > Yes like Jeff said, this actually exists as PearsonCorrelationSimilarity. In > the case where the mean of each series is 0, the result is the same. The > fastest way I know to see this is to just look at this form of the sample > correlation: > http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/c/a/6/ca68fbe94060a2591924b380c9bc4e27.png > ... and note that sum(xi) = sum (yi) = 0 when the mean of xi and yi are 0. > You're left with sum(xi*yi) in the numerator, which is the dot product, and > sqrt(sum(xi^2)) * sqrt(sum(yi^2)) in the denominator, which are the vector > sizes. This is just the cosine of the angle between x and y. > > One can argue whether forcing the data to be centered is right. I think it's > a good thing in all cases. It adjusts for a user's tendency to rate high or > low on average. It also makes the computation simpler, and more consistent > with Pearson (well, it makes it identical!). This has a good treatment: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_product-moment_correlation_coefficient#Geometric_interpretation > > Only for this reason I'd mark this as won't-fix for the moment; the patch is > otherwise nice. I'd personally like to hear more about why to not center if > there's an argument for it. > > >> Cosine item similarity implementation >> ------------------------------------- >> >> Key: MAHOUT-387 >> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAHOUT-387 >> Project: Mahout >> Issue Type: New Feature >> Components: Collaborative Filtering >> Reporter: Sebastian Schelter >> Assignee: Sean Owen >> Fix For: 0.3 >> >> Attachments: MAHOUT-387.patch >> >> >> I needed to compute the cosine similarity between two items when running >> org.apache.mahout.cf.taste.hadoop.pseudo.RecommenderJob, I couldn't find an >> implementation (did I overlook it maybe?) so I created my own. I want to >> share it here, in case you find it useful. >> > >