[Chicago] netflix prize

[Kumar McMillan]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Cosmin Stejerean <cstejerean at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've started looking at the Netflix prize around the time when it was
>  announced but I quickly lost focus since I couldn't find anyone to
>  work with. If a team is started I'd love to join.

ditto.  I got as far as downloading the data, planning out a strategy
with IPython2 (Chris McAvoy wrote some code for this already, I
think), and attempting to grok a simple approach using the Slope One
algorithm ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slope_One ).  I'd say
creating a team would provide good motivation to dig back into this
project.  Slope One won't get us anywhere near the winning RMSE but
still it would be interesting to implement this kind of logic and
personally I'd like to learn more about putting these kind of
algorithms to use in Python.  I imagine the contest will be over soon
too (http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard), but that doesn't mean
it wouldn't be fun to play :)

btw ... this would be a great Saturday House project :
http://groups.google.com/group/chicago-saturday-house

Kumar