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LensKit is a set of Python tools for experimenting with and studying recommender systems. It provides support for training, running, and evaluating recommender algorithms in a flexible fashion suitable for research and education.

LensKit for Python (LKPY) is the successor to the Java-based LensKit project.

[!IMPORTANT] If you use LensKit for Python in published research, please cite:

Michael D. Ekstrand. 2020. LensKit for Python: Next-Generation Software for Recommender Systems Experiments. In <cite>Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management</cite> (CIKM '20). DOI:10.1145/3340531.3412778. arXiv:1809.03125 [cs.IR].

[!WARNING] This is the main branch of LensKit, following new development in preparation for the 2024 release. It will be changing frequently and incompatibly. You probably want to use a stable release.

Installing

To install the current release with Anaconda (recommended):

conda install -c conda-forge lenskit

If you use Pixi, you can add it to your project:

pixi add lenskit

Or you can use pip:

pip install lenskit

To use the latest development version, install directly from GitHub:

pip install -U git+https://github.com/lenskit/lkpy

Then see Getting Started

Developing

To contribute to LensKit, clone or fork the repository, get to work, and submit a pull request. We welcome contributions from anyone; if you are looking for a place to get started, see the issue tracker.

Our development workflow is documented in the wiki; the wiki also contains other information on developing LensKit. User-facing documentation is at https://lkpy.lenskit.org.

We recommend using Pixi for developing LensKit. Our pixi.toml file contains the development dependencies; to instal l dependencies for all of the LensKit packages (on Linux or macOS), use the dev-full environment:

$ pixi install -e dev-full

You can use pixi shell to open a shell within this environment:

$ pixi shell -e dev-full

If you are on Windows, use dev-core instead of dev-full; some LensKit packages will be missing dependencies (specifically Implicit, HPF, and FunkSVD).

Testing Changes

You should always test your changes by running the LensKit test suite:

python -m pytest

If you want to use your changes in a LensKit experiment, you can locally install your modified LensKit into your experiment's environment. We recommend using separate environments for LensKit development and for each experiment; you will need to install the modified LensKit into your experiment's repository:

conda activate my-exp
conda install -c conda-forge
cd /path/to/lkpy
pip install -e . --no-deps

You may need to first uninstall LensKit from your experiment repo; make sure that LensKit's dependencies are all still installed.

Once you have pushed your code to a GitHub branch, you can use a Git repository as a Pip dependency in an environment.yml for your experiment, to keep using the correct modified version of LensKit until your changes make it in to a release.

Resources

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS 17-51278. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.