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The Netflix Prize. Netflix. Netflix is a subscription-based movie and television show rental service that offers media to subscribers: Physically by mail Over the internet Has a catalog of over 100,000 movies and television shows Subscriber base of over 10 million. Recommendations.
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Netflix • Netflix is a subscription-based movie and television show rental service that offers media to subscribers: • Physically by mail • Over the internet • Has a catalog of over 100,000 movies and television shows • Subscriber base of over 10 million
Recommendations • Netflix offers users the ability to rate movies and television shows that they have seen • Depending on those ratings, Netflix provides recommendations of movies and television shows that the subscriber would like to watch • These recommendations are based on an algorithm called Cinematch
Cinematch • Uses straightforward statistical linear models with a lot of data conditioning • This means that the more a subscriber rates, the more accurate the recommendations will become
Netflix Prize • Competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for movies and television shows, based on previous ratings • Offered a $1 million prize to the team who could improve Cinematch’s accuracy by 10% • Awarded a $50,000 progress prize for the team who makes the most progress for each year before the 10% mark was reached • The contest started on October 2, 2006 and would run until at least October 2, 2011, depending on when a winner was chosen
Metrics • The accuracy of the algorithms was measured by using root mean square error, or RMSE • Chosen because it is a well-known, single value that can account for and amplify the contributions of errors such as false positives and false negatives
Metrics • Cinematch scored 0.9525 on the test subset • The winning team needed to score at least 10% lower, with an RMSE of 0.8563
Results • The contest ended on June 26, 2009 • The threshold was broken by the teams “BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos” and “The Ensemble”, both achieving a 10.06% improvement over Cinematch, with an RMSE of 0.8567 • “BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos” won the prize due to the team submitting their results 20 minutes before “The Ensemble”
Netflix Prize Sequel • Due to the success of their contest, Netflix announced another contest to further improve their recommender system • Unfortunately, it was discovered that the anonymized customer data that they provided to the contestants could actually be used to identify individual customers • This, combined with a resulting investigation by the FTC and a lawsuit, led Netflix to cancel their sequel
Sources • http://blog.netflix.com/2010/03/this-is-neil-hunt-chief-product-officer.html • http://www.netflixprize.com • http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/technology/13netflix.html?_r=1