README.md

Recommendation system of music tracks: building and testing

Cloning repository

Firsly, we need to clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:spolivin/mle-project-sprint-4-v001.git

Loading data

Files used during building the recommendation system are downloaded using the following commands:

wget https://storage.yandexcloud.net/mle-data/ym/tracks.parquet -P data

wget https://storage.yandexcloud.net/mle-data/ym/catalog_names.parquet -P data

wget https://storage.yandexcloud.net/mle-data/ym/interactions.parquet -P data

The entire process of building the recommendations can be consulted in this notebook.

Virtual environment

We can activate the virtual environment using the following series of commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3.10-venv
python3.10 -m venv .venv_recsys_app
source .venv_recsys_app/bin/activate
pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

NOTE: Before installing the packages into the virtual environment, it might be necessary to firstly run sudo apt-get install build-essential to install additional packages to Ubuntu system.

Preparation for launching a microservice

Before launching the services, it is essential to firstly load data files with recommendations from S3 cloud storage. Data take up quite a lot of memory so this method was chosen to avoid overloading the repository with large files.

Loading all required files is pretty straightforward, all one need to do is run this script using the following command:

python s3_scripts/prepare_datasets.py

After running the script all files are loaded to data folder by default.

Application launch

Microservice is made up of 4 modules in services:

• recommendations_service.py => Main application which generates recommendations of all types
• events_service.py => Service for adding online events (musical tracks) to the online history of a user
• features_service.py => Service for generating online recommendations based on musical tracks similarity
• recs_offline_service.py => Service for generating offline recommendations
• constants.py => File with main constants used for the application functioning.

Recommendation service can be launched using main script which executes each of the aforementioned services by --service-name flag:

# Terminal window 1
python run_service.py --service-name=main_app

# Terminal window 2
python run_service.py --service-name=recs_store

# Terminal window 3
python run_service.py --service-name=features_store

# Terminal window 4
python run_service.py --service-name=events_store

After all services having been launched successfully (which will be shown in each terminal), requests to the application can be sent.

Microservice testing

Testing the application can be launched using the following command:

# Terminal window 5 (testing)
python test_service.py

The output of the testing process is automatically logged to test_service.log.

Strategy of blending recommendations

As can be seen in the main application code, provided that a user has an online history, the final recommendations for such a user are computed by mixing up online and offline recommendations where online ones are located on odd places, while offline recommendations - on even places.

Stopping the application

After finishing working with the application, one needs to stop each of the 4 service by entering Ctrl+C in each of the respective terminal windows.