should I use mahout for this?

Question

I want to recommend items that are tagged and are categorized into three price categories (cheap, regular and expensive). I know that with Mahout recommendation could be achieved but here's why I don't know how to use it.

Mahout is based on the other users opinion but all of the new items that I want to recommend are just the new ones that don't have any preferences set yet.

Is Mahout the right tool for this? Is this content-based? (which mahout don't support yet????) or should I use classification?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Since I've never built any recommender system - do not take this answer very seriously (no-one has answered it, so I try)

recommendation system has to be built on some already known (or partially known data). If you have only new (unseen) data there is only possibility to use some clustering algorithm in order to build some clusters.

And if those clusters would be ok, they can be used for training some recommendation system.

Mahout is just a tool which implement various ML methods. You can use other tools like Weka, R, ...