Well, it’s official buckaroos, Netflix announced today exactly who won that $1,000,000 prize. If you remember, they announced that one of two teams had finally reached that magical 10% rate they were looking for, but they didn’t tell anyone exactly won. Well, the cat is finally out of the bag.
The official winner is “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos”. This team was a combination of several other teams that weren’t doing as well, and decided to combine their efforts in order to win. The 30 members managed to find the right combination of variables to meet the 10% accuracy rate required to win the contest.
So what’s next? Netflix is trying to make their predictive software even more accurate. The first contest included 100 million movie ratings, with no personally identifiable data included. The next set of data will include demographic and behavioral data, and will require the people attempting to win to create a “taste profile” based on the movies that a user has rented or looked at in the past.
[via NYTimes Bit Blog]