Learners : Matchbox recommender : Learner API

Serialization

Both trained and untrained models can be serialized and deserialized.

Serialization is achieved through the Save extension method on the ILearner interface. There are two overloads of this method - one that takes in a file, and one that takes in a stream and a formatter. The former internally calls the latter:

recommender.Save("Model.bin");

Deserialization is done using the MatchboxRecommender.Load static method. It also has two overloads which correspond to the ones of the Save method. In addition, Load requires 4 generic parameters to be specified: the type of an instance source, the type of a user, the type of an item, and the type of a feature source.

var recommender =
  MatchboxRecommender.Load<StandardDataset, User, Item, FeatureSource>("Model.bin");

When a model is deserialized the generic parameters have to match exactly the ones of the recommender that had been serialized. Also, during deserialization a version check will be performed - in case the serialized learner does not match the target one.

Note that only the parameters of the model and the user-defined mapping are persisted. None of the training data will be serialized.