Does Wikipedia Information Help Netflix Predictions?
John D. Lees-Miller, Fraser Anderson, Bret Hoehn, Russell Greiner · 2008
We explore several ways to estimate movie similarity from the free encyclopedia Wikipedia with the goal of im-proving our predictions for the Netflix Prize. Our system first uses the content and hyperlink structure of Wikipedia articles to identify similarities between movies. We then predict a user’s unknown ratings by using these similarities in conjunction with the user’s known ratings to initialize matrix factorization and k-Nearest Neighbours algorithms. We blend these results with existing ratings-based predic-tors. Finally, we discuss our empirical results, which sug-gest that external Wikipedia data does not significantly im-prove the overall prediction accuracy. 1