Netflixprize, A Different Approach

A friend of mine forwarded this link to me, This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize. This fellow is a 48-year-old Englishman (his team name is known as justaguyinagarage) , a retired management consultant with an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master's in operations research. If you read the article, you will realise that he approached the problem different from other mathematicans and computer scientists. Since his approach is not based on any complex mathematical functions or models, his movie prediction run-time will definitely be shorten by signifiance amount and this is a plus point for anyone who wants to adopt his method.

According to today's Netflix Prize Leaderboard, he ranked 9th with a score of 0.8740 (8.14% improvement over Cinematch).

Recently I have been adjusting my approach and tried to adopt some of his psychology ideas. Run time downs from 10+ days to just about 4 hours, but not much improvement in terms of score. Also I am reading this book - Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart that he mentioned in his blog. I hope to have some breakthrough in my movie prediction.