The movie recommendation problem

Product recommendation is big business. Online stores use it to up-sell to customers by recommending other products that they could buy. Making better recommendations leads to better sales. When online shopping is selling to millions of customers every year, there is a lot of potential money to be made by selling more items to these customers.

Product recommendations have been researched for many years; however, the field gained a significant boost when Netflix ran their Netflix Prize between 2007 and 2009. This competition aimed to determine if anyone can predict a user's rating of a film better than Netflix was currently doing. The prize went to a team that was just over 10 percent better than the current solution. While this may not seem like a large improvement, such an improvement would net millions to Netflix in revenue from better movie recommendations.

Obtaining the dataset

Since the inception of the Netflix Prize, Grouplens, a research group at the...