News flash: The Netflix Prize leader, presenting at Predictive Analytics World, Feb 18-19 in San Francisco, won the Netflix Progress Prize last month! The last three years of Netflix's "brutal" competition have seen remarkable innovation that to this day is edging the needle closer to the 10% mark required to win the $1 million prize. Team "BellKor in BigChaos" achieved a 9.44% increase to claim the Progress Prize, and the team has since increase their performance to 9.63% – they're getting pretty close, folks. In a sense, that is 96% of the way there. Winning team member Andreas Töscher will speak on "Advanced Approaches for Recommender Systems and the Netflix Prize" – see: http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/agenda.php#advancedapproaches Product recommendation systems is a hot application of predictive analytics for all kinds of business. This is where the rubber hits the road, making it possible to target cross-sell across thousands of products, taking steps towards evening out what is typically a "long tail" distribution of sales, and improving customer satisfaction by helping them find what they want most from overwhelmingly large selections. Several other sessions at PAW-09 will also address product recommendations, including:
- A keynote by Amazon's former Chief Scientist
- "Visualization and the Netflix Prize"
- "It's the Data, Stupid!"
With all this, attendance is recommended…