Building a Similar Movies Recommendation System

Why?

I recently came across a movie/tv-show recommender, couchmoney.tv. I loved it. I decided that I wanted to build something similar, so I could tinker with it as much as I wanted.

I also wanted a recommendation system I could use via a REST API. Although I have not included that part in this post, I did eventually create it.

How?

By measuring the cosine of the angle between two vectors, you can get a value in the range [0,1] with 0 meaning no similarity. Now, if we find a way to represent information about movies as a vector, we can use cosine similarity as a metric to find similar movies.

As we are recommending just based on the content of the movies, this is called a content based recommendation system.

Data Collection

Trakt exposes a nice API to search for movies/tv-shows. To access the API, you first need to get an API key (the Trakt ID you get when you create a new application).

@@ -140,7 +140,7 @@

In the end, I could have dropped the embeddings field from the table schema as I never got around to using it.

Scripting Time

from database import *
@@ -243,7 +243,7 @@
 
 Running this script took me approximately 3 hours, and resulted in an SQLite database of 141.5 MB
 
-Embeddings!
+Embeddings!
 
 I did not want to put my poor Mac through the estimated 23 hours it would have taken to embed the sentences. I decided to use Google Colab instead.
 
@@ -308,7 +308,7 @@ As of writing this post, I did not include any other database except Trakt. 
 
 That's it!
 
-Interacting with Vectors
+Interacting with Vectors
 
 We use the trakt_id for the movie as the ID for the vectors and upsert it into the index. 
 
@@ -359,7 +359,7 @@ It is possible that this additional step of mapping could be avoided by storing

Testing it Out

movie_name = "Now You See Me"
@@ -405,21 +405,21 @@ Spies (2015): A secret agent must perform a heist without time on his side
 
 For now, I am happy with the recommendations.
 
-Simple UI
+Simple UI
 
 The code for the flask app can be found on GitHub: navanchauhan/FlixRec or on my Gitea instance
 
 I quickly whipped up a simple Flask App to deal with problems of multiple movies sharing the title, and typos in the search query.
 
-Home Page
+Home Page
 
 
 
-Handling Multiple Movies with Same Title
+Handling Multiple Movies with Same Title
 
 
 
-Results Page
+Results Page
 
 
 
@@ -429,14 +429,14 @@ Spies (2015): A secret agent must perform a heist without time on his side
 
 Test it out at https://flixrec.navan.dev
 
-Current Limittations
+Current Limittations
 
 
 Does not work well with popular franchises
 No Genre Filter
 
 
-Future Addons
+Future Addons
 
 
 Include Cast Data
-- 
cgit v1.2.3


From 9e620084e57378952c1a7f8e0a772ebebd18932b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Navan Chauhan 
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2024 20:35:09 -0600
Subject: quick fix

---
 docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html | 6 +++---
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

(limited to 'docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html')

diff --git a/docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html b/docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html
index 717513f..c1c103b 100644
--- a/docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html
+++ b/docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html
@@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
     
     
     
-    id="building-a-similar-movies-recommendation-system">Building a Similar Movies Recommendation System
+    Building a Similar Movies Recommendation System
     
     
     
-    Building a Similar Movies Recommendation System" />
-    Building a Similar Movies Recommendation System" />
+    
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-- 
cgit v1.2.3


From 01ff93c9c16867216f2d249664803860e1d6d5eb Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Navan Chauhan 
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2024 22:49:40 -0600
Subject: generate new theme

---
 .../2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html     | 55 +++++++++++++++-------
 1 file changed, 37 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)

(limited to 'docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html')

diff --git a/docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html b/docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html
index c1c103b..bba6725 100644
--- a/docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html
+++ b/docs/posts/2022-05-21-Similar-Movies-Recommender.html
@@ -2,14 +2,26 @@
 
 
     
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-    Building a Similar Movies Recommendation System
     
     
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@@ -29,21 +41,27 @@
     
     
 
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+            Navan
+            Something Funny
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+            3D designs
+            RSS Feed
+            colophon
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+        © 2024. All rights reserved.
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 	Building a Similar Movies Recommendation System
 
 Why?
@@ -450,14 +468,15 @@ Spies (2015): A secret agent must perform a heist without time on his side
 Filter based on popularity: The data already exists in the indexed database
 
 
+


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