After leaving Jukedeck I completed the four-course Recommender Systems specialisation from the University of Minnesota on Coursera:
- Introduction to Recommender Systems: Non-personalised and Content-based
- Nearest Neighbour Collaborative Filtering
- Recommender Systems: Evaluation and Metrics
- Matrix Factorisation and Advanced Techniques
Completed in about a month at a leisurely pace. Very well-taught — the coursework used spreadsheet-based implementations to make the algorithms tangible before diving into code. Content-based filtering, item-item and user-user collaborative filtering, matrix factorisation — all well covered.
I skipped the Java-based Honours Track but plan to build Python implementations of the key algorithms. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the area.