02.29.08
This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize
This month’s Wired contains an article about the Netflix prize, offering $1,000,000 to the person or team that can improve Netflix’s recommendation engine by 10%. It’s an interesting tale of the frontier of data-centric personal services. The “hero” of the article uses not only mathematical algorithms but psychological concepts when gleaning information about past preferences in order to predict future ones.
For instance, there’s the concept of “inertia,” or another way, relativity, when ranking movies on a simple 1-5 scale. Somebody might give the same movie two different rankings depending on the most recent movie he or she watched. If you see, for instance, Gattaca followed by The Matrix, you might give The Matrix a 4 because you think it’s so much better than Gattaca. But if the previous movie was a 5 (I’ll let you fill in your favorite here), well, maybe The Matrix earns only a 3. Mathematically, we would say that the relationship between the set of movies and a person’s ratings for them may not actually define a function as the purely math models assume.
The other cool thing about this article is that it’s written by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, with whom I went to grad school back in the day (the nineties).
Blogged with Flock
Tags: math, news, netflix, wired, jordan ellenberg