Artificial Intelligence/Rules to guess user taste in Apparel/Clothing

Are there standard rules engine/algorithms around AI that would predict the user taste on a particular kind of product li开发者_如何学JAVAke clothes. I know it's one thing all e-commerce website will kill for. But I am looking out for theoretical patterns defined out there which would help make that prediction in a better way, if not accurately.

Two books that cover recommender systems:

• Programming Collective Intelligence: Python, does a good job explaining the algorithm, but doesn't provide enough help IMO in terms of understanding how to scale.
• Algorithms of the Intelligent Web: Java, harder to follow, but also covers using persistence, in this case MySQL, to facilitate scaling and identifiers areas in example code that will not scale as-is.

Basically two ways of approaching the problem, user or item based. Netflix appears to use the former, while Amazon the latter. Typically user based requires more time and/or processing power to generate recommendations because you tend to have more users than items to consider.

Not sure how to answer this, as this question is overly broad. What you are describing is a Machine Learning kind of task, and thus would fall under that (very broad) umbrella. There are a number of different algorithms that can be used for something like this, but most texts would tell you that the definition of the problem is the important part.

What parts of fashion are important? What parts are not? How are you going to gather the data? How noisy is the data? All of these are important considerations to the problem space. Pandora does a similar type of thing with music, with their big benefit being that their users tell them initially what they like and don't like.

To categorize their music, they actually have trained musicians listening to the music to identify all sorts of stuff. See the article on Ars Technica here for more information about that. Based on what I know about fashion tastes, I would say that it is a similar problem space, and would probably require experts to "codify" the information before you could attempt to draw parallels.

Sorry for the vague answer - if you want more specifics, I would recommend asking a more specific question, about specific algorithms or data sets, etc.