JSM Preliminary Online Program
This is the preliminary program for the 2007 Joint Statistical Meetings in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Activity Number: 478
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2007 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistical Computing
Abstract - #309727
Title: The Netflix Challenge for Statisticians
Author(s): J. Brian Gray*+
Companies: The University of Alabama
Address: Dept of ISM, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487-0226,
Keywords: data mining ; machine learning ; massive data set ; predictive modeling ; recommendation system
Abstract:

In October 2006, Netflix, the online DVD rental service, announced a contest to award $1,000,000 to the first person or team to improve on the accuracy of the Netflix customer ratings prediction model by at least 10%. Netflix made available data on 100 million customer DVD ratings for the contest. Within three months, the leaders in the contest had reached 6.67% improvement. While this contest would appear to be an excellent opportunity for statisticians to prove their mettle in data mining, statisticians are conspicuously absent from the contest leaderboard. In this presentation, I will discuss the Netflix contest as well as the challenges and opportunities that it presents to the statistical community. In addition, I will describe some approaches to analyzing the Netflix data.

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Revised September, 2007