Twitch Streamer-Game Recommender System

Abstract
Matrix Factorization techniques have been proven to be more effective in recommender systems than standard user based or item based methods. Using this knowledge, Funk SVD and SVD++ are compared by the accuracy of their predictions of Twitch streamer data.

Introduction
As watching video games is becoming more popular, those interested are becoming interested in Twitch.tv, an online platform for guests to watch streamers play video games and interact with them. A streamer is an person who broadcasts them-self playing a video game or some other thing for an audience (the guests of the website.) The site allows the guest to first select the game/category to view and then displays currently active streamers for the guest to select and watch. Twitch records the games that a streamer plays along with the amount of time that a streamer spends streaming that game. This is how the score is generated for a streamer’s game. These three terms form the streamer-game-score (user-item-rating) tuples that we use to train out models.
The our problem’s solution is similar to the purpose of the Netflix prize; however, as opposed to suggesting a user a movie, the goal is to suggest a user a game. We built a model to predict the score that a streamer will have for a game. The score field in our data is fundamentally different from a movie rating in Netflix because the way a user influences a game’s score is by actively streaming it, not by giving it an score based off opinion. The dataset being used it the Twitch.tv dataset provided by Isaac Jones [1]. Also, the only data used in training the models is in the form of the streamer-game-score (user-item-rating) tuples. It will be known if these data points with limited information will be able to give an accurate prediction of a streamer’s score for a game. SVD and SVD++ are the baseis of the models being trained and tested. Scikit’s Surprise library in Python3 is used for the implementation of the models.