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."

Another method to predict the winners

[digitaldc]

Bring a decibel meter and a stopwatch and find the films with the loudest and longest:

1) Laughter
2) Applause
3) Standing Ovations afterward


This simple method will give you a good idea of who will be the winners.

Fit your stereotype?

[246o1]

From TFA (words in the description that help or hurt it): "Golden: academic, accomplished, bedroom, complex, dialogue, dream, death, focus, girl, human, high, journey, love, mother, narrative, romance, relationship, superbly, sex, ultimately. Kiss of death: Africa, America, American, beautiful, black, best, emotional, fascinating, great, inspired, lake, new, riveting, Sundance, sexy, story, subtitles, truth, vision, world." So, they want complex, academic films about girl-mother relationships with a strong narrative of romance and sex. Nothing about beautiful black people in Africa or America with any sort of interest in visions, truth, or the world, especially if said black people are sexy and live near a great, nay, the best lake.

Bayesian for Slashdot

[bhima]

I've been thinking about this for a while...

Someone should develop a client side Bayesian Filter / Moderation system for Slashdot.

Think about it...

A sizable portion of people around here are not consistantly assholes so it doesn't really make sense to add them to a "foe" list.
Frequently things are in strange topics so it doesn't make sense to ignore whole topics.
Not all new members are trolls so modding all new members down doesn't make sense either.
And the current moderation system is subjected to other people's current peeves and political leanings.

And please don't tell me to do it, I'm an embedded developer not a web developer... I have no idea where to even begin with it.

A better thing

[tessonec]

This [slashdot.org] was a far better (and open source) applecation of Bayesian filters

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Bayesian for Slashdot

[utexaspunk]

Yeah- I've wanted a site like digg/slashdot that worked like this for a while- users can vote on anything, and then anything you haven't voted on is given a score that is calculated according to how the people who most consistently vote in agreement with you score the story/comment. The site is custom-tailored to what you want- People who like stupid crap will mod up stupid crap and get more stupid crap because other people who like stupid crap will have modded up the same stupid crap and more, while people who like good stuff will mod up good stuff and will get more of it because other people who modded up the same stuff that they thought was good will have modded up more stuff that they'll like. It's impervious to trolls or advertisers, because if I don't like advertising, I'll mod all advertising down and thus it will pre-mod stuff with advertising down because other people who hate advertising will have modded it down...

Re:Bayesian for Slashdot

[Billosaur]

And the current moderation system is subjected to other people's current peeves and political leanings.

Which is what makes it so much fun!

Seriously, its wonderful that Bayesian filters are useful, but why put blinders on? Slashdot would simply cease to be interesting if you could will away anything you didn't like. Intelligent discourse requires an airing of all sides of an issue and theoretically this can lead to consensus building, if the best parts of all ideas are combined. Of course you're going to get people with very little to say, or very little between the ears, muddying the waters -- the challenge is to take the disparate elements and meld them to something coherent. Superfluous elements will be winnowed out and hopefully the end product is something most people can agree on.

Of course this is Slashdot, the Internet equivalent of a bar brawl. The rough-and-tumble of this kind of fourm is what keeps it interesting and more importantly, as much as we are infuriated by those who don't agree with us, makes us think.

adjectives bad in film descriptions, menus

[Harlan879]

I was amused by something in the article that said that too many adjectives in the description ("riveting!") is a predictor of a negative outcome for a film. That reminds me of a rule of thumb for restaurants that a friend suggested -- if the name of the dish is full of adjectives, it'll taste bad. Amusingly, I just did a Google search for "restaurant menu adjectives", and most of the hits on the first page were for middle-school lesson plans where kids add adjectives to menus to make the food seem more appetizing!

Re:Bayesian for Slashdot

[bhima]

I think you are looking at it the wrong way:

Using the current mod system on Slashdot you are using someone else's blinders.
Using the Friend / Foe system you are using a static subset.

Less than 20% of the comments around here are either meaningful, thought provoking, or relevant... I want to see those that truly are interesting and between the current mod system and the outright volume I can't in the amount of time I'm willing to spend reading Slashdot.

Slashdot is not like the Internet equivalent of a bar brawl it's more like kids talking about sex in the playground of an elementary school after a heavy rain.

Re:Bayesian for Slashdot

[BridgeBum]

Check out http://reddit.com./ [reddit.com.] At least, once it isn't broken. It's a news aggragation site per slashdot/digg, but incorporates some of what you are looking for.