lenskit/lkpy

Data Management
===============

.. py:currentmodule:: lenskit.data

LensKit provides a unified data model for recommender systems data along with
classes and utility functions for working with it, described in this section of
the manual.

.. versionchanged:: 2024.1
    The new :class:`~lenskit.data.Dataset` class replaces the Pandas data frames
    that were passed to algorithms in the past.  It also subsumes
    the old support for producing sparse matrices from rating frames.

Getting started with the dataset is fairly straightforward:

    >>> from lenskit.data import load_movielens
    >>> mlds = load_movielens('data/ml-latest-small')
    >>> mlds.item_count
    9066

You can then access the data from the various methods of the :class:`Dataset` class.
For example, if you want to get the ratings as a data frame:

    >>> mlds.interaction_matrix('pandas', field='rating')
            user_num  item_num  rating
    0              0        30     2.5
    1              0       833     3.0
    2              0       859     3.0
    3              0       906     2.0
    4              0       931     4.0
    ...
    [100004 rows x 3 columns]

Or obtain item statistics:

    >>> mlds.item_stats()
            count  user_count  rating_count  mean_rating  first_time
    item
    1         247         247           247     3.872470   828212413
    2         107         107           107     3.401869   828213150
    3          59          59            59     3.161017   833955544
    4          13          13            13     2.384615   834425135
    5          56          56            56     3.267857   829491839
    ...
    [9066 rows x 5 columns]

.. _data-model:

Data Model and Key Concepts
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The LensKit data model consists of **users**, **items**, and **interactions**,
with fields providing additional (optional) data about each of these entities.
The simplest valid LensKit data set is simply a list of user and item
identifiers indicating which items each user has interacted with.  These may be
augmented with ratings, timestamps, or any other attributes.

Data can be read from a range of sources, but ultimately resolves to a
collection of tables (e.g. Pandas :class:`~pandas.DataFrame`) that record user,
item, and interaction data.

.. _data-identifiers:

Identifiers
-----------

Users and items have two identifiers:

* The *identifier* as presented in the original source table(s).  It appears in
  LensKit data frames as ``user_id`` and ``item_id`` columns.  Identifiers can
  be integers, strings, or byte arrays, and are represented in LensKit by the
  :data:`~lenskit.data.EntityId` type.
* The *number* assigned by the dataset handling code.  This is a 0-based
  contiguous user or item number that is suitable for indexing into arrays or
  matrices, a common operation in recommendation models.  In data frames, this
  appears as a ``user_num`` or ``item_num`` column.  It is the only
  representation supported by NumPy and PyTorch array formats.

  User and item numbers are assigned based on sorted identifiers in the initial
  data source, so reloading the same data set will yield the same numbers.
  Loading a subset, however, is not guaranteed to result in the same numbers, as
  the subset may be missing some users or items.

  Methods that add additional users or items will assign numbers based on the
  sorted identifiers that do not yet have numbers.

Identifiers and numbers can be mapped to each other with the user and item
*vocabularies* (:attr:`~Dataset.users` and :attr:`~Dataset.items`, see the
:class:`Vocabulary` class).

.. _dataset:

Dataset Abstraction
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The LensKit :class:`Dataset` class is the standard LensKit interface to datasets
for training, evaluation, etc. Trainable models and components expect a dataset
instance to be passed to :meth:`~lenskit.pipeline.Component.train`.

Datasets provide several views of different aspsects of a dataset, documented in
more detail in the :class:`reference documentation <Dataset>`.  These include:

*   Sets of known user and item identifiers, through :class:`Vocabulary` objects
    exposed through the :attr:`Dataset.users` and :attr:`Dataset.items`
    properties.

Creating Datasets
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Several functions can create a :class:`Dataset` from different input data sources.

.. autosummary::
    from_interactions_df

Loading Common Datasets
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LensKit also provides support for loading several common data sets directly from
their source files.

.. autosummary::
    load_movielens

Dataset Implementations
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

:class:`Dataset` itself is an abstract class that can be extended to provide new
data set implementations (e.g. querying a database).  LensKit provides a few
implementations.

.. autosummary::
    ~lenskit.data.matrix.MatrixDataset
    ~lenskit.data.lazy.LazyDataset