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Netflix Prize Contest Ends, Down To the Wire
suraj.sun updates us on the Netflix Prize now that the competition has officially closed. We discussed the new leader with one day to go in the contest: The Ensemble, taking the lead from long-time leader BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, the first contestant to submit an entry that broke the 10% barrier. In the contest's final day, BellKor re-took the lead with 20 minutes to go, then The Ensemble apparently pulled a Michael Phelps with 4 minutes to go, squeaking ahead by 0.01%. At least so the leaderboard claims — but those numbers are posted by the competing teams. The NY Times reports that an official winner will not be named until September — Netflix needs that much time to pore through the complex entries and read the code. Netflix contacted BellKor on Sunday to tell them the team remained in first place; The Ensemble has had no such notification.
The reason BellKor is still first is that the published scores are irrelevant. The scores that matter for the prize are based on an unpublished data set known only to Netflix (to prevent people submitting answers that are optimized for the challenge data and work poorly on everything else). On this secret data set, BellKor's algorithm apparently performs better than The Ensemble's.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Where have you been?
[2009-07-26]New Leader In Netflix Prize Race With One Day To Go
[2009-07-26]Netflix Prize May Have Been Achieved
[2007-11-27]Anonymity of Netflix Prize Dataset Broken
[2007-11-14]Close but no Cigar for Netflix Recommender System
[2006-10-02]Build a Better Netflix, Win a Million Dollars?
[2008-11-22]Interest Still High In the Netflix Algorithm Competition
[2009-10-09]Netflix Prize Competitor Already Beats Netflix
etc..
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."