A recommendation system is one of the popular applications of Data Science. A Book Recommendation system is an application used to recommend similar books to a user. If you want to learn how to build a book recommendation system, this article is for you. This article will take you through how to build a book recommendation system using Python.
Book Recommendation System using Python
A book recommendation system should recommend similar books based on the user’s interest. The dataset needed to build a book recommendation system is collected from Kaggle. You can download the dataset from here.
Now let’s import the necessary Python libraries and the dataset we need for this task:
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
from sklearn.feature_extraction import text
from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import linear_kernel
data = pd.read_csv("book_data.csv")
print(data.head())book_authors ... image_url 0 Suzanne Collins ... https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1447303603l... 1 J.K. Rowling|Mary GrandPré ... https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1255614970l... 2 Harper Lee ... https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1361975680l... 3 Jane Austen|Anna Quindlen|Mrs. Oliphant|George... ... https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320399351l... 4 Stephenie Meyer ... https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1361039443l... [5 rows x 12 columns]
I will select three columns from the dataset for the rest of the task (book_title, book_desc, book_rating_count):
data = data[["book_title", "book_desc", "book_rating_count"]] print(data.head())
book_title ... book_rating_count 0 The Hunger Games ... 5519135 1 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ... 2041594 2 To Kill a Mockingbird ... 3745197 3 Pride and Prejudice ... 2453620 4 Twilight ... 4281268 [5 rows x 3 columns]
Let’s have a look at the top 5 books in the dataset according to the number of ratings:
data = data.sort_values(by="book_rating_count", ascending=False)
top_5 = data.head()
import plotly.express as px
import plotly.graph_objects as go
labels = top_5["book_title"]
values = top_5["book_rating_count"]
colors = ['gold','lightgreen']
fig = go.Figure(data=[go.Pie(labels=labels, values=values)])
fig.update_layout(title_text="Top 5 Rated Books")
fig.update_traces(hoverinfo='label+percent', textinfo='percent', textfont_size=30,
marker=dict(colors=colors, line=dict(color='black', width=3)))
fig.show()
Before moving forward, let’s check if the data has null values or not:
print(data.isnull().sum())
book_title 0 book_desc 1331 book_rating_count 0 dtype: int64
The dataset has null values in the book description column. Let’s drop the rows having null values:
data = data.dropna()
Now I will use the book description column as the feature to recommend similar books to the user:
feature = data["book_desc"].tolist() tfidf = text.TfidfVectorizer(input=feature, stop_words="english") tfidf_matrix = tfidf.fit_transform(feature) similarity = linear_kernel(tfidf_matrix, tfidf_matrix)
Now I will set the book title column as an index so that we can find similar books by giving the title of the book as an input:
indices = pd.Series(data.index,
index=data['book_title']).drop_duplicates()Now here’s how to write a function to recommend similar books:
def book_recommendation(title, similarity = similarity):
index = indices[title]
similarity_scores = list(enumerate(similarity[index]))
similarity_scores = sorted(similarity_scores, key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)
similarity_scores = similarity_scores[0:5]
bookindices = [i[0] for i in similarity_scores]
return data['book_title'].iloc[bookindices]
print(book_recommendation("Letters to a Secret Lover"))21823 The Kabbalah of Jesus Christ, Part 1 The True ... 28960 Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ 17173 Jesus and Moses in India 7944 The Jesus I Never Knew 16976 Beautiful Outlaw: Experiencing the Playful, Di... Name: book_title, dtype: object
Summary
A book recommendation system should recommend similar books according to the interest of the user. As a data science beginner, you must work ok this data science project to learn about recommendation systems. You can find many more data science projects for practice from here. I hope you liked this article on how to build a book recommendation system using Python. Feel free to ask valuable questions in the comments section below.
