Machine learning and learning theory research
The second Netflix prize is canceled due to privacy problems. I continue to believe my original assessment of this paper, that the privacy break was somewhat overstated. I still haven’t seen any serious privacy failures on the scale of the AOL search log release. I expect privacy concerns to continue to be a big issue …
I attended the Netflix prize ceremony this morning. The press conference part is covered fine elsewhere, with the basic outcome being that BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos won over The Ensemble by 15-20 minutes, because they were tied in performance on the ultimate holdout set. I’m sure the individual participants will have many chances to speak about …
A $1M qualifying result was achieved on the public Netflix test set by a 3-way ensemble team. This is just in time for Yehuda‘s presentation at KDD, which I’m sure will be one of the best attended ever. This isn’t quite over—there are a few days for another super-conglomerate team to come together and there …
The competitors for the Netflix Prize are tantalizingly close winning the million dollar prize. This year, BellKor and Commendo Research sent a combined solution that won the progress prize. Reading the writeups 2 is instructive. Several aspects of solutions are taken for granted including stochastic gradient descent, ensemble prediction, and targeting residuals (a form of …
In October 2006, the online movie renter, Netflix, announced the Netflix Prize contest. They published a comprehensive dataset including more than 100 million movie ratings, which were performed by about 480,000 real customers on 17,770 movies. Competitors in the challenge are required to estimate a few million ratings. To win the “grand prize,” they need …
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