Friday, March 28, 2008

How Not to Recommend

A friend of mine pointed out The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later this morning. The article points out how difficult it has been to make significant improvements on the Netflix rating prediction problem.

This article reinforces a lot of my own feelings. I continue to believe that recommendations based on ratings are inherently flawed. Among other things
  • predicting ratings from ratings is hard
  • predicting real user preferences from ratings is even harder
  • most people don’t rate things very much, if at all (makes #1 even harder)
All of these factors are eased considerably if you just get rid of the idea that you have to predict ratings. Observing real behavior and then predicting that same behavior is vastly easier.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I continue to believe that recommendations based on ratings are inherently flawed.
After 8 years it was written
may you pls share some from 0 to end algorithmical language like Python or C code example
for this statement pls.
Or at least some paper, blog with details?