Discover a Houseplant App

Did you know that January 10th was National Houseplant Day? It was a great coincidence that around that time, I was working on an app that is supposed to recommend similar houseplants to people so that they can discover different plants they might like.

Motivation

I got the inspiration to create an app revolving around houseplants because my mom, cousin, and best friend are plant lovers. Their houses are basically mini-forests. I scraped all my data off of houseplant411.com, created a crude recommendation system and dressed it up in a flask app which was lastly deployed on Heroku.

Data

The data I scraped included images of the 136 different popular house plants, their descriptions, and other information related to their care such as light, water, fertilizer, temperature, humidity, flowering, pests, diseases, soil, pot size, pruning, propagation, special occasion, and poisonous plant information. I used beautiful soup to do all of my web-scraping.


The Recommendation System

At the core of my app is a recommendation system made possible by using cosine similarity on vectors created using Tfidfvectorizer. The vectors came from the text descriptions of the plants and care information related to the plants. I compared the vectors that came from just the text descriptions using cosine similarity to create a cosine similarity matrix. I also compared the vectors that came from care information using cosine similarity to create another matrix. I then found the average of the two matrices to create my last matrix which I used to recommend 5 different, yet similar plants to a plant of the user's choice.

The App

The application can be found here - https://discover-a-houseplant.herokuapp.com/

The idea of the app is that three random plants are generated from my list of 136 plants. A user chooses one of the plants he or she likes and then they are brought to a new page which has 5 similar, yet different plants to the plant he or she chose. There is a photo, a name and a description of each plant on each page of the application.

Results

You can decide if you like the recommendations put forth by this app or not! But, I think this is a fun way to discover new plants.

Code

The code for this project can be found on my Github at https://github.com/morningkaren/discover-a-houseplant .