Nov 19 2007
Netflix Prize Still Unclaimed
Last year, Netflix offered a $1 million prize for anybody who could improve its algorithm for recommending movies by 10 percent. It’s a data junkie’s dream, a veritable “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” for statisticians. Alex and I even thought about entering it ourselves.
Nobody’s hit the target yet, but a team from AT&T Labs has come closest, hitting a 8.43% improvement and scoring $50,000 from Netflix. The team has spent about 2,000 hours working on the problem, which means, at this point, they’ve earned an average of $25 per hour. Not very impressive for a bunch of PhDs.
Alex says he’s gunning for the Princeton team.
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