06. Video: Why SVD?

Singular Value Decomposition

In the next part of this lesson, you will first get exposure to Singular Value Decomposition, or SVD. We will soon see why this technique falls short for many recommendation problems. However, understanding traditional SVD approaches to matrix factorization is useful as a start to a number of matrix factorization techniques that are possible in practice.

In order to implement SVD for many recommendation engines, we will need to use a slightly modified approach known as FunkSVD. This approach proved to work incredibly well during the Netflix competition, and therefore, it is one of the most popular recommendation approaches in use today.

Let's first take a closer look at traditional SVD.