What topic / project to choose for the diploma?

Question

data mining

Good afternoon!
My question is somewhat non-standard, on SO it was dismissed as inappropriate to the rules.
The situation is as follows: I am a 4th year student, I chose data mining as a general topic for my diploma, more specifically, recommendation systems. A year ago I wrote a term paper on this topic, however, more of a survey than some kind of research.
Actually the question is: in which direction should I dig further? There is a desire not just to get a diploma and score, but, if possible, to develop further in this direction. I worked a little with things like mahout and scikit-learn, but before that I wrote a lot of my bikes. In general, from the PL I have a good knowledge of java and python, I am also familiar with haskell.
I simply don’t have data for some large-scale project, but taking a ready-made data set and writing something on its basis is uninteresting and a passed stage. (worked with www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~cziegler/BX ) The
research supervisor offers two options: either go deep into the theory, taking some narrow algorithm and try to improve it, or participate in some project for application knowledge in practice.
I also thought about helping some library to the best of my modest ability (the same scikit-learn, for example), but there are a number of problems here.
I did not find any open-source projects with a focus on use, and the option with deepening into the theory scares with complexity, besides, currently popular problems also require large amounts of data.
What can you advise?

Answer 1

I would strongly advise you to take one of the tasks from kaggle.com and get a decent place there.

Answer 2

I am not an expert in Data Mining, but current topics from our university can help you. Look here: http://www.ke.tu-darmstadt.de/lehre/arbeiten/list

Answer 3

Ozone has a rather vague system of personal recommendations, for example. You can try to make such a system based on their products / categories and then offer them.

Answer 4

Exactly the same situation now...