Game Recommendation Project

Getting started

To have the easiest setup experience make sure the following bash scripts are executable:

./install_environment.sh
./reproduce_benchmark_results.sh
./start_app.sh
./run_scraping_tests.sh

If unsure or if they are not executable yet, please run the following commands in your terminal:

chmod 700 ./install_environment.sh
chmod 700 ./reproduce_benchmark_results.sh
chmod 700 ./start_app.sh
chmod 700 ./run_scraping_tests.sh
chmod 700 ./train_recommender.sh

Installing the environment

If you want the automated process then please run this command in your terminal:

./install_environment.sh

In the case you want to do it manually you can also execute the commands in this order:

# Creates new conda environment
conda create -n project python=3.10.8 ipython
# Activates conda environment
conda activate project
# Makes script folder callable as module in python scripts
conda install conda-build
conda develop ./scripts
# Installs dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

If you have any issues, please read the messages I provided in ./install_environment.sh they provide pointers how the issue might be resolved.

For the following scripts please make sure the environment 'project' is activated in you terminal. If unsure please run:

conda activate project

Get the data

Please download the zip from this folder:

Link to data

Please unzip the file at the root of this directory such that there is a folder data/.

For the App please download the zip from here:

Link to app data

Please unzip the file at scripts/app such that there is a folder scripts/app/files.

Reproduce results

To reproduce the benchmark results please run in your terminal

./reproduce_benchmark_results.sh

or run directly in your terminal:

./python evaluate_recommender.py

Train a recommender

If you want to train a recommender you have a rich set of options to do so. Please check the flags in train_recommender.py or run a sample training by simply executing

./train_recommender.sh

Bring App online

To start the App locally, run

./start_app.sh

If you see a message like

2023-02-16 11:48:06.772 `st.experimental_singleton` is deprecated...

Don't worry about that. Simply refresh the page or proceed to Recommendations and the message will be gone for this session.

Test Scraping pipeline

To test the scraping scripts, simply run

./run_scraping_tests.sh

You can then inspect the files in:

./tests/nvidia_games_test_data
./tests/steam_games_test_data

They contain outputs from scraping the nvidia game website and the Steam API. Since these endpoints change on a regular basis or the IP Address got blocked the tests may fail. For this, I provided you data from prior runs to inspect. If the test cases succeed and there is new data, the old files should have been overwritten. If you get an error such as: selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary, then check out this stackoverflow post which might help: Link. Its possible linked to the fact that you don't have Chrome or chromedriver installed.

Closing Remarks

Structural overview and additional comments if not mentioned above already:

.
├── LICENSE.md
├── README.md
├── build_training_dataset.py                       -> For building Training datasets with top n games.
├── config.yaml -> Configurations for scrapers
├── data                                            -> Data for training algorithms
│   ├── raw
│   └── training_dataset
├── evaluate_recommender.py
├── install_environment.sh
├── queryable_users.txt                             -> Small excerpt of users that can be used in the app. Compare with their games under https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/{id}/
├── reproduce_benchmark_results.sh
├── requirements.txt
├── run_scraping_tests.sh
├── scripts
│   ├── app                                         -> Scripts and files to run app
│   ├── data_processors                             -> Scripts that process training and scraped data
│   ├── models                                      -> Model definitions
│   ├── scrapers                                    -> For scraping Nvidia and Steam
│   ├── streamlit_helpers                           -> Helper functions for app
│   └── tools                                       -> Place for generic functions
├── start_app.sh
├── tests
│   ├── __pycache__
│   ├── nvidia_games_test_data
│   ├── nvidia_processor_test.py
│   ├── nvidia_scraper_test.py
│   ├── steam_games_test_data
│   ├── steam_processor_test.py
│   └── steam_scraper_test.py
├── train_recommender.py

This repository was tested and worked in:

MacOS: Version 12.5.1
Ubuntu: Version 22.04

During the tests it seemed that at least 8 GB of RAM should be available for everything to be running smoothly. We hope you enjoy this work!

Citing

If you use the code or data from this repo please cite:

@misc{Groeger:2023,
  Author = {Michael Gröger},
  Title = {Game recommendations using content, collaborative filtering and deep learning based recommenders},
  Year = {2023},
  Publisher = {GitHub},
  Journal = {GitHub repository},
  Howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/michaelgroeger/game-recommendation}}
}