The contest has been ongoing for almost 3 years. The objective was to improve Netflick’s current movie recommendation system, called Cinematch, by at least 10%. BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos team did so, and the 7 team members were awarded the $1,000,000 Netflix Prize today.
So, how did BPC do it? We’re not sure, but here’s their explanation, and also here … their approach seems to involve improvements to Collaborative Filtering via Neighborhood Models and Latent Factor Models.
Anyway, their maps look interesting – they have zoomable interactive affinity maps for music, movies, books and TV shows. The map for movies, for example, shows that if you liked the original Terminator, you’re also likely to want to rent The Fly, whereas fans of Terminator 2 would go for Lord of the Rings instead.
RecSys describes recommender systems as follows:
Recommender systems are software applications that aim to support users in their decision-making while interacting with large information spaces. They recommend items of interest to users based on preferences they have expressed, either explicitly or implicitly. The ever-expanding volume and increasing complexity of information on the Web has therefore made such systems essential tools for users in a variety of information seeking or e-commerce activities. Recommender systems help overcome the information overload problem by exposing users to the most interesting items, and by offering novelty, surprise, and relevance. Recommender technology is hence the central piece of the information seeking puzzle. Major e-commerce sites such as Amazon and Yahoo are using recommendation technology in ubiquitous ways. Many new comers are on their way and entrepreneurs are competing in order to find the right approach to use this technology effectively.
Plus it’s a great way to keep customers and build business and ward off competition as per the following interview with Netflix exec Reed Hastings:
Netflix Awards $1 Million Netflix Prize – Netflix press release , Sept 21 2009
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Netlix should have gone further and hired all 7 of those people. Why let another company scoop them up?
These people should use that prize as seed money to go into business for themselves!