Anime Recommendation System: Project Overview

• Created scrapers by using Jikan (時間) REST API to scrap anime and user information from myanimelist[DOT]net.
• Scraped 2333 anime TV productions between 2010-2022 from myanimelist using python and the created scraper.
• Scraped 86269 individual users' data.

TODO:

• EDA
• model build

Code and Resources Used

Python Version: 3.9
Packages: pandas(1.4.4)
Jikan API: https://jikan.moe/
Scraper Github: https://github.com/ildeniz/Anime_Recommendation_System/blob/master/mal_scraper.py

Web Scraping

The scrapers used to scrape 2333 anime TV productions between 2010-2022 from myanimelist[DOT]net, and 86269 individual users' scores & watch status info.

I had to get creative to collect user data since Jikan API no longer supports scraping anime list of individual users. Instead of scraping data directly from user data, I utilised each anime's "user updates" section. This section goes up to a maximum of 100 pages, and each page is consistent with 75 individual users. Due to time constraints issues, I preferred to scrap data from the first 5 pages. During scraping, I realised that sometimes users appear on multiple pages; I dealt with this problem in the source and implemented a section to remove duplicates while scraping.

For each anime, we got the following information:

• Anime title
• Anime MAL ID
• Rating (Animes w/o a user rating are excluded.)
• Number of users who rated the anime
• Number of members of the anime
• Number of members favourited the anime
• Genre
• Premiered year
• Premiered season

For each user, we got the following information:

• User name
• Score assigned by the user to a given anime
• User's watch status of the anime
• The id number of the anime

Data Cleaning & Feature Engineering

Result contamination avoidance:

• Suspicious (fake, bot, troll) user accounts are excluded from the data set.
• Observations with watching status as 'Plan to Watch' are excluded from the data set.
• Observations with watching status as 'Dropped' with user scores more than 6 are excluded from the data set.

Missing values:

• Animes without determined genres are classified as 'NonClassified'.
• User infos with missing values in watching status are accounted as corrupted data and excluded from the data set.

Feature engineering:

• Created dummies of the comma seperated values in 'Genre' column.

EDA

Model Building

Model performance

Productionization