Beginner’s Guide: Build a Movie Recommender in Python with Google Colab and Create an API Using Flask

Matheshyogeswaran
4 min readOct 13, 2024

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Hello everyone, in this article we’ll walk you through building a movie recommendation system in Python. We’ll start by importing the MovieLens dataset, then use machine learning techniques to recommend movies based on genres. Finally, we’ll create an API using Flask to serve these recommendations.

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1. Introduction

Recommendation systems have become a fundamental part of platforms like Netflix and YouTube. By suggesting content based on user behavior or similarities, they help personalize user experiences. In this article, we’ll create a simple recommendation system that suggests movies based on their genres using Python.

2. Setting Up Google Colab

Google Colab is a free cloud-based environment that allows you to run Python code directly in your browser. Let’s set up our project in Colab and get started.

  1. Open Google Colab.
  2. Create a new notebook.

3. Importing the Movie Dataset

We’ll use the MovieLens 1M dataset for this project. You can download it from the following…

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Matheshyogeswaran

Undergraduate at the University of Moratuwa, Trainee Software Engineer, and tech enthusiast exploring cloud computing and software development.