Predicting movie ratings and recommender systems

Book excerpt: A 195-page monograph by a top-1% Netflix Prize contestant. Learn about the famous machine learning competition. Improve your machine learning skills. Learn how to build recommender systems. What's inside:introduction to predictive modeling,a comprehensive summary of the Netflix Prize, the most known machine learning competition, with a $1M prize,detailed description of a top-50 Netflix Prize solution predicting movie ratings,summary of the most important methods published - RMSE's from different papers listed and grouped in one place,detailed analysis of matrix factorizations / regularized SVD,how to interpret the factorization results - new, most informative movie genres,how to adapt the algorithms developed for the Netflix Prize to calculate good quality personalized recommendations,dealing with the cold-start: simple content-based augmentation,description of two rating-based recommender systems,commentary on everything: novel and unique insights, know-how from over 9 years of practicing and analysing predictive modeling.