Recommending new movies

The Netflix Prize (NP) competition gave much attention to collaborative filtering (CF) approaches. Matrix factorization (MF) based CF approaches assign low dimensional feature vectors to users and items. We link CF and content-based filtering (CBF) by finding a linear transformation that transforms user or item descriptions so that they are as close as possible to the feature vectors generated by MF for CF. We propose methods for explicit feedback that are able to handle 140,000 features when feature vectors are very sparse. With movie metadata collected for the NP movies we show that the prediction performance of the methods is comparable to that of CF, and can be used to predict user preferences on new movies. We also investigate the value of movie metadata compared to movie ratings in regards of predictive power. We compare our solely CBF approach with a simple baseline rating-based predictor. We show that even 10 ratings of a new movie are more valuable than its metadata for predicting user ratings.