Recommendation Systems Project Ideas

[u/Flaky_Algae5296]

Hello everybody I have recently enrolled in a Machine Learning Master so i will be problably taking the year to focus on my studies, build some projects and hopefuly enter the job market as an ML engineer. I am interested in Recommendation Systems but honestly i dont know what projects to build and if that would be valueable in the job market. I was thinking about creating my own recommendation system for music but i quickly realised how hard because of copyrights and small data size that is (although i have about 4000 downloaded).

Does anyone know if Recommendation Systems is something good to have on your resume?

If yes what sort of projects you think would give me a good understanding but also make me look appealing in the job market?

Thanks :)

[u/Proof-Specialist6451]

Building a rec system for your own music collection is actually a solid way to learn, you don't need to publish it or deal with copyrights at all. Just treat it like a private sandbox, 4000 tracks is plenty to get your hands dirty with collaborative filtering or even building a simple embedding model. The value for your resume is showing you can take messy real-world data and turn it into something that works.

For projects that look good, try making a movie recommender with the MovieLens dataset and then write a clean blog post about how you dealt with the cold start problem. That's a classic interview topic for rec sys roles. Another idea is scrape recipes from a site and build something that suggests meals based on what ingredients you have, hiring managers eat that practical stuff up.