[stillsut]

There was a parsimonious model that got to 8% improvement. We know this as it was posted publicly by "Simon Funk" [0] after he decided to give up halfway through the competition.

This simple but more accurate model would have been a useful foundation for Netflix to build its own internal models on, and highlight the flaws in the assumption of the Cinermark algo.

[0] http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html

[andreasvc]

That looks interesting. I wonder if nowadays that result could be replicated with readily available algorithms from scikit-learn.