The Netflix prize
In 2006, Netflix announced that it would award a $1,000,000 prize to the best recommender algorithm submitted that could outperform their own algorithm. Two years later, the prize was awarded to a team called BellKor for their Pragmatic Chaos system. Netflix never used the prize-winning Pragmatic Chaos system, explaining that a production version would be too expensive to implement. That prizewinner turned out to be a mix of over 100 different methods. Meanwhile, some of the top competitors went on to extend and market their own recommender systems. Some of the resulting algorithms have been patented.
The competition was open to anyone who registered. Data for testing proposed algorithms was provided by Netflix. The main dataset ...
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