A transparent approach to data representation
This work addresses data representation challenges for Netflix viewer rating analysis, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods with specific improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of representing Netflix viewer ratings by using a binary attribute representation (BAR) model that classifies viewers with discrete bits, resulting in a compact and transparent representation with fewer attributes needed to achieve the same error level as similar methods.
We use a binary attribute representation (BAR) model to describe a data set of Netflix viewers' ratings of movies. We classify the viewers with discrete bits rather than continuous parameters, which makes the representation compact and transparent. The attributes are easy to interpret, and we need far fewer attributes than similar methods do to achieve the same level of error. We also take advantage of the nonuniform distribution of ratings among the movies in the data set to train on a small selection of movies without compromising performance on the rest of the movies.