Archive for the ‘Netflix Prize’ tag
Stanford students working on Netflix Algorithms
Anand Rajaraman, the co-founder of Kosmix also teaches Data Mining at Stanford. Here’s an interesting note from his blog.
Some of his students are working to crack algorithms for the on-going Netflix “Better Recommendation Logic” Prize of $1 million. Read it !!
Here’s how the competition works. Netflix has provided a large data set that tells you how nearly half a million people have rated about 18,000 movies. Based on these ratings, you are asked to predict the ratings of these users for movies in the set that they have not rated. The first team to beat the accuracy of Netflix’s proprietary algorithm by a certain margin wins a prize of $1 million!
Different student teams in my class adopted different approaches to the problem, using both published algorithms and novel ideas. Of these, the results from two of the teams illustrate a broader point. Team A came up with a very sophisticated algorithm using the Netflix data. Team B used a very simple algorithm, but they added in additional data beyond the Netflix set: information about movie genres from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Guess which team did better?
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