I\'ve always been curious as to how these systems work. For example, how do netflix or Amazon determine what recommendations to make based on past purchases and/or ratings?
Ofcourse there is algorithms that will recommend you with prefered items. Different data mining techniques have been implemented for that. If you want more basic details on Recommender System then visit this blog. Here every basics has been covered to know about Recommender System.
This is a classification problem - that is, the classification of users into groups of users who are likely to be interested in certain items.
Once classified into such a group, it is easy to examine the purchases/likes of other users in that group and recommend them.
Therefore, Bayesian Classification and neural networks (multilayer perceptrons, radial basis functions, support vector machines) are worth reading up on.
One technique is to group users into clusters and recommend products from other users in the same cluster.