I am a newbie learning mahout.
I learned that there are five recommenders in mahout. User-based, Item-based,...
The datasets I used is movielens 100K
I am thinking implement a little different movie recommender from user based one. i.e., instead of taking user id as an input to recommend movies to only one user, I want to take user demographic information, e.g., age range, gender, occupation, and zip code.
But the problem is how do I create my own user similarity method (The original one is taking two long type user id as parameters) and how do I combine u.user file and u.data file together?
I understand your question now. I think the simplest thing is to temporary create a dummy user with the demographic properties you are querying for, and then recommend for that dummy user.
Yes, you would have to write a UserSimilarity that implements whatever similarity rule you want on top of the demographic data.