InsightIQ Blog
Online Analytics in Action - Netflix Competition: Now it’s time to pay up
Jul 1 2009
See a previous post for a summary of the competition - 'Netflix: What were they thinking?
It seems that after 3 years a team has won the prize. The winning solution was submitted on June 26th, and still must be verified, but all indications are that this solution has broken through a barrier many thought unattainable. The winning solution predicts customers' movie interests 10%+ better than Netflix's internal system. That does not sounds like much (10%) but given that Netflix had already squeezed about as much information out of their data as possible, and additional data sources could not be used in the competition, this was a colossal task.
What's interesting to me about the winning solution is that it is a combination of models. The top 2 teams decided enough-was-enough and joined forces recently. They combined their solutions, which individually were close to the 10% mark, and the result was an incremental lift that catapulted them to the finish line.
This type of analytic solution is called a meta-model, where 2 or more models are combined to enhance performance. This is always a good practice in customer analytics (marketing analytics, risk analytics, fraud analytics,..) as well as if you have 2 models, which essentially predict the same outcome, combining them will nearly always provide enhanced results. Even if one model is much better than the other(s), adding models to a solution in effect is adding incremental value not already available in the top model(s). In fact, every winning solution at the DMA analytic challenge the past 3 years has been the result of a meta-model.
More information on the winning Netflix solution is available in the following link:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/winning-teams-join-to-qualify-for-1-million-netflix-prize/
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