On the SitePoint PHP blog today Wern Ancheta has posted the first part of a series about creating a recommendation engine with the help of PHP and a system called Prediction IO.

In this tutorial, I'm going to walk you through Prediction IO, an open-source machine learning server. It allows you to create applications that could do the following: recommend items (e.g. movies, products, food), predict user behavior, identify item similarity and rank items. You can pretty much build any machine learning application with ease using Prediction IO. You don't have to deal with numbers and algorithms and you can just concentrate on building the app itself.

He walks you through the download and install of the Prediction IO software, how to start up the server and how to access its web interface. He shows you how to create an "engine" that will be used to make the recommendations and some of the settings allowing you to tailor it to your needs. The script will hook into The Movie DB API for content. He starts in on the PHP packages that will be needed to make the API connection and recommendations, but the actual code will come in a later article.