Paper 9: Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars

Title: Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars
Author: Xavier Amatriain and Justin Basilico
Link: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/04/netflix-recommendations-beyond-5-stars.html

In their blog post, the Netflix team described how important recommendations are to their business, and how they use them. In the opening section, the authors described the Netflix Prize, and the various improvements that had come out of it. By combining Singular Value Decomposition and Restricted Boltzmann Machines, the winner of the Netflix prize was able to lower Netflix's RMSE of 0.9525 to 0.88.

The rest of the article was dedicated to describing how and where Netflix integrates it's recommendations. As well as the more obvious high-level genrea recommendations, Netflix uses it's recommendations to come up with more specific genera subtopics such as "Imaginative Time Travel Movies from the 1980s". Finally, Netflix stressed that explaining why movies are recommended is key to building user trust.