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EasyStudy

The fastest way to build, run, and analyze interactive user studies — for recommender systems and any other item-based interactive system.

EasyStudy is a modular, highly extensible framework that ships out-of-the-box functionality for every phase of a study: data loading & presentation, preference elicitation, baseline algorithms, questionnaires, and results comparison. A simple study can be deployed in a few clicks from a web UI, while complex designs stay fully programmable via plugins.

Credo: "Make simple things fast and hard things possible."

Why EasyStudy?

  • Batteries included. Unlike tools that make you bring your own recommender, EasyStudy ships datasets, algorithms (e.g. EASE, popularity, VAE, LensKit wrappers), and preference-elicitation methods — so you can run a personalized study with zero external services.
  • Domain-generic. Built for recommender systems, already used for data-visualization studies and university teaching. If your study shows people items, records how they interact, and asks them questions, EasyStudy fits.
  • Extensible by design. Add datasets, algorithms, elicitation methods, metrics, or whole study flows by subclassing a base class or dropping in a plugin.
  • Lightweight core. uv sync (or pip install -e . from a clone — not yet on PyPI) pulls a small pure-Python stack; heavy backends (RecBole, TensorFlow, LensKit) are opt-in extras.

Where to go next

- :material-rocket-launch: **[Quickstart](quickstart.md)** — a running study in 15 minutes. - :material-lightbulb: **[Concepts](concepts.md)** — plugins vs studies vs instances. - :material-cursor-default-click: **[Create a study (no code)](create-a-study.md)** — from the admin UI. - :material-puzzle: **[Extending fastcompare](extending.md)** — add a dataset / algorithm / metric. - :material-package-variant: **[Write your first plugin](first-plugin.md)**. - :material-database: **[Data model & exporting results](data-model.md)**.

Citation

If you use EasyStudy in your research, please cite the RecSys'23 paper (see CITATION.cff).