Build a Better Netflix, Win a Million Dollars?

An anonymous reader writes "In a quest to better movie recommendations, Netflix is opening their database (nytimes, registration and first child required) to users to try to craft a better recommendation technology. The problem is not easy. Says one researcher: 'You're competing with 15 years of really smart people banging away at the problem.'" Recommender systems are really an interesting problem, and that is likely very interesting data to play with.

Comments

Re:database?

[thatnerdguy]

http://www.netflixprize.com/

Re:Copy the Music Genome Project

[vontrotsky]

The problem with recommendation systems is that they use too little information to catagorize their subject.

What they need to do is copy the methods of the Music Genome Project (www.pandora.com), and list a larger set of attributes for the films. This way it can recommend films by checking many more characteristics, such as director, tone, writer, or subject.

In this contest, you run your own code and submit the results to NetFlix to be scored. This means that you can use any other data (e.g. A Movie Genome projct) you can compile to enhance your rankings. Netflix apparently specifically designed the contest to allow this.

Re:Privacy issues?

[Cruise_WD]

From http://www.netflixprize.com/ :

To prevent certain inferences being drawn about the Netflix customer base, some of the rating data for some customers in the training and qualifying sets have been deliberately perturbed in one or more of the following ways: deleting ratings; inserting alternative ratings and dates; and modifying rating dates.

Plus all the usual replacing of IDs and such you'd expect. Looks like they're trying to avoid a repeat of the AOL debacle at least.