WatchNext – Movie Recommendation System

WatchNext is an interactive movie recommendation web app built using Python and Streamlit. It uses a collaborative filtering approach with a K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) model and cosine similarity to suggest movies based on user input.

The system is trained on the MovieLens dataset and converts the user–movie ratings into a sparse matrix for efficient computation. Users can search for a movie or select genres to receive personalized recommendations with similarity scores.

Unlike traditional recommendation systems that require extensive user history, WatchNext generates relevant suggestions from a single input, making it fast, simple, and user-friendly.

Running with Docker

1. Build and start

docker compose up --build

2. Open the app Visit http://localhost:8501.

Other commands

docker compose down          # stop the container
docker compose up --build -d # run in the background

Running Locally

To install dependencies please run the following command in the terminal:

pip install -r requirements.txt

To run the app please run the following command in the terminal:

streamlit run recommender.py