If you liked my blog, you’d like this post. Trust me!

One of the sites that most impressed me when I first started browsing the web was called MovieCritic.com. You would rate a few movies you saw, then it would predict whether you’d like a new movie. It would even let you find one that matches both your taste and your girlfriend’s. Pure magic, for that time. For me that was the first demonstration of what we can achieve with the web as a medium.

MovieCritic is dead for a few years now, but recommender systems are now everywhere. NetFlix runs one of the most successful commercial implementations (Amazon another classic example, “People who bought this book…”), and two years ago they challenged researches to come up with a system that would perform 10% better than their own, in predicting users’ ratings. The best achieving team so far almost got there, and today I attended a talk in the Technion by Yehuda Koren, one of the team members and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Haifa lab.

Most methods follow the neighborhood-based model – find an item’s neighbours (in some representation), and predict based on their rating. This may be done in a user-user matching (find users like this user, then check their rating) or item-item (find items like the rated item, then predict based on how the user rated those items). One of the interesting approaches proposed by Koren’s team represented both users and movies in the same space, then looked for similarity in this unified space.

The most striking finding for me, however, was that winning strategies did not use anything from the movie’s “content” features. Genre, director, actors, length, etc. – all these did not produce any additional value beyond the plain statistical analysis and correlation of ratings and users, and are therefore not used at all. In fact, Koren claims that knowing that a certain user is a Tom Hanks fan makes no difference, we will infer this from the recommendations anyway (assuming there are enough of them of course).

I find that almost sad… Not being able to intelligently reason over the underlying logic exposed by an AI software is a tremendous drawback in my eyes, even if the overall prediction score is better. Telling the user “you may want to watch this movie because A and B and C” can benefit in more satisfaction by the user, understanding even the incorrect predictions, and possibly leading to a feedback cycle. Doing away with it is like showing web search results without keyword highlighting, no visible cue for the user why this result was returned (“…trust me, I know what’s the right answer for you!“).