Recommender Systems — How Facebook Learns Your Interests

How does Facebook know what you are interested in? In this lesson, students will use Facebook data (their own data, if preferred) to learn about user-based collaborative filtering, a technique used by companies like Amazon, Facebook and Netflix to recommend things to users. They will follow up with an unplugged exercise to dive deeper into how user-based collaborative filtering works and end with a discussion on how these algorithms help or hurt people.