New leader for the Netflix Prize

In a last second twist, a new team has managed to best the previous Netflix Prize winner BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos ready to claim the million dollar top spot. The new team called The Ensemble is the amalgamation of 3 other teams known as Grand Prize Team, Opera Solutions, and Vandelay United.

To remind you of the situation which you can also read in my previous post here, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos was the first team to submit an algorithm achieving more than 10% improvement on recommendation accuracy. The exact improvement was 10.08% on the benchmark data set provided by Netflix. When this happened some 29 days ago, a timer was started giving other teams 30 days to do better in order to claim the prize for themselves. At the conclusion of the 30 days, the highest scoring team gets the money.

In an incredible twist, just a day before the 30 day period expired, The Ensemble team submitted an algorithm that achieves 10.09% percent improvement. This means, that with one day remaining, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos has to either improve their results by at least 0.01% or finish in second place behind The Ensemble.

What a great finish!

Let's see what happens in the next 24 hours but in my opinion, Netflix should compensate both teams. Or, in the least, they should give everyone another 30 days to respond to the most recent challenger. Why not?

You can follow the most recent developments via the Netflix Prize leader board here.