Personalisation of content is a frequently used technique intended to improve user engagement and provide more value to users. Systems designed to provide recommendations to users are called recommender systems and are used in many different industries. This study evaluates the potential of personalisation in a media group primarily publishing local news, and studies how information stored by the group may be used for recommending content. Specifically, the study focuses primarily on content-based filtering by article tags and user grouping by demographics. This study first analyses the data stored by a media group to evaluate what information, data structures, and trends have potential use in recommender systems. These insights are then applied in the implementation of recommender systems, leveraging that data to perform personalised recommendations. When evaluating the performance of these recommender systems, it was found that tag-based content selection and demographic grouping each contribute to accurately recommending content, but that neither method is sufficient for providing fully accurate recommendations.

Automated systems for producing product recommendations to users is a relatively new area within the field of machine learning. Matrix factorization techniques have been studied to a large extent on data consisting of explicit feedback such as ratings, but to a lesser extent on implicit feedback data consisting of for example purchases.The aim of this study is to investigate how well matrix factorization techniques perform compared to other techniques when used for producing recommendations based on purchase data. We conducted experiments on data from an online bookstore as well as an online fashion store, by running algorithms processing the data and using evaluation metrics to compare the results. We present results proving that for many types of implicit feedback data, matrix factorization techniques are inferior to various neighborhood- and association rules techniques for producing product recommendations. We also present a variant of a user-based neighborhood recommender system algorithm \textit{(UserNN)}, which in all tests we ran outperformed both the matrix factorization algorithms and the k-nearest neighbors algorithm regarding both accuracy and speed. Depending on what dataset was used, the UserNN achieved a precision approximately 2-22 percentage points higher than those of the matrix factorization algorithms, and 2 percentage points higher than the k-nearest neighbors algorithm. The UserNN also outperformed the other algorithms regarding speed, with time consumptions 3.5-5 less than those of the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, and several orders of magnitude less than those of the matrix factorization algorithms.