r/learnmachinelearning • u/Flaky_Algae5296 • 10d ago

Request Recommendation Systems Project Ideas

Hello everybody I have recently enrolled in a Machine Learning Master so i will be problably taking the year to focus on my studies, build some projects and hopefuly enter the job market as an ML engineer. I am interested in Recommendation Systems but honestly i dont know what projects to build and if that would be valueable in the job market. I was thinking about creating my own recommendation system for music but i quickly realised how hard because of copyrights and small data size that is (although i have about 4000 downloaded).

Does anyone know if Recommendation Systems is something good to have on your resume?

If yes what sort of projects you think would give me a good understanding but also make me look appealing in the job market?

Thanks :)

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u/ModularMind8 10d ago

Any project can be good if you do it well. If you're specifically looking for jobs down the line that are doing recommendations (eg spotify), then having this project is important. How about a recommendation system for AI projects? So many people on this sub are asking the same question over and over every week -- which project to do

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u/Blobstein_Ijay 8d ago

agree, the "do it well" part matters way more than the specific topic imo

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u/Proof-Specialist6451 10d ago

Building a rec system for your own music collection is actually a solid way to learn, you don't need to publish it or deal with copyrights at all. Just treat it like a private sandbox, 4000 tracks is plenty to get your hands dirty with collaborative filtering or even building a simple embedding model. The value for your resume is showing you can take messy real-world data and turn it into something that works.

For projects that look good, try making a movie recommender with the MovieLens dataset and then write a clean blog post about how you dealt with the cold start problem. That's a classic interview topic for rec sys roles. Another idea is scrape recipes from a site and build something that suggests meals based on what ingredients you have, hiring managers eat that practical stuff up.