Bayesian Filters Predict Sundance

JohnGrahamCumming writes "The LA Times reports on a company's use of Bayesian filtering to predict the winners at the Sundance Film Festival. They use a modified POPFile email filter and claim an 81% success rate."

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Unimpressed

[Big Nothing]

"Our engineers were thinking that determining whether a movie is good or bad could be similar to determining whether e-mail is spam or not," said Unspam Chief Executive Prince, 31, who loves the festival and uses it as a recruiting tool. "We had the last 10 years of the festival's film guides, which are like inputs, and then a bunch of outputs, like how many people saw a film, did it win anything at Sundance, did it have commercial success. If you could figure out the pattern between the inputs and the outputs, then you could actually predict future winners."

I'm not a Spam guru so please excuse me if I'm wrong, but isn't 81% a horrible result? Perhaps not for movie prediction but in Spam filtering?

Re:Unimpressed

[Raistlin77]

That depends. If it predicts and filters 84% of all spam, then it can't be anything but good. However, if 84% of what it predicts and filters is indeed spam, then 16% was not and was filtered needlessly - that's bad.

Bayesian filter to predict Slashdot's new stories?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I'm not sure what kind of crack-simulator Slashdot put into its related stories selector, but some kind of Bayesian filter to figure out the relationship might be helpful.

For example...

Ask Slashdot: State of WLAN Support on Linux?
Related...
    IT: Microsoft Spending $120M To Look Smaller
    Games: Defying Review Aggregation
    Games: Competitive Gaming Hits the Mainstream

WTF?

Re:Shocking news!

[goombah99]

Yeah, I get so tired of people publishing probabilty success rates without stating what the baseline is.

For example, I could announce I have an 85% accurate weather prediction system. it's this: predict the sun will shine most of the day. nowhere does it rain all day more than 15% of the days. so my predictor is 85% accurate.

When you claim an accuracy you need to also give the null model accuracy or it's gibberish.