soMLier: a South African wine recommender system

Abstract

Though several commercial wine recommender systems exist, they are largely tailored to consumers outside of South Africa (SA). Consequently, these systems are of limited use to novice wine consumers in SA.To address this, the aim of this research is to develop a system for South African consumers that yields high-quality wine recommendations, maximises the accuracy of predicted ratings for those recommendations and provides insights into why those suggestions were made. To achieve this, a hybrid system "soMLier" (pronounced "sommelier") is built in this thesis that makes use of two datasets.