From the course: Advanced Predictive Modeling: Mastering Ensembles and Metamodeling

Ensemble wins Netflix Prize - SPSS Tutorial

From the course: Advanced Predictive Modeling: Mastering Ensembles and Metamodeling

Start my 1-month free trial

Ensemble wins Netflix Prize

“

- [Instructor] Back in 2006, Netflix was still delivering DVDs by mail. When customers had to wait a week for a movie, they were prone to churn if they didn't like the movie that they received. The Netflix prize offered a million dollars for any team that could increase the accuracy of the recommendation model by 10% or more. Sean Gerrish in How Smart Machines Think goes into detail about how the competition unfolded. A year into the competition, a $50,000 progress award was up for grabs, and three teams were competing. A day before the first year's deadline, the ground shifted, he writes. The two teams that been hanging around second and third place formed an alliance. They combined their models, submitting the average of their models' scores to the leaderboard, and suddenly they were in first place. They didn't ultimately win, but they had started a real trend. But clearly, machine learning had turned a corner. Even though the idea behind ensembles was already decades old, ensembles had gained a lot of visibility from the competition, and it became a much more widely-used technique.

Contents