Artificial Intelligence/Rules to guess user taste in Apparel/Clothing

Question

Are there standard rules engine/algorithms around AI that would predict the user taste on a particular kind of product like clothes. I know it's one thing all e-commerce website will kill for. But I am looking out for theoretical patterns defined out there which would help make that prediction in a better way, if not accurately.

Answer 1

Two books that cover recommender systems:

• Programming Collective Intelligence: Python, does a good job explaining the algorithm, but doesn't provide enough help IMO in terms of understanding how to scale.
• Algorithms of the Intelligent Web: Java, harder to follow, but also covers using persistence, in this case MySQL, to facilitate scaling and identifiers areas in example code that will not scale as-is.

Basically two ways of approaching the problem, user or item based. Netflix appears to use the former, while Amazon the latter. Typically user based requires more time and/or processing power to generate recommendations because you tend to have more users than items to consider.