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The Netflix Prize, Big Data, SVD and R

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One of the key data analysis tools that the BellKor team used to win the Netflix Prize was the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) algorithm. As a file on disk, the Neflix Prize data (a matrix of about 480,000 members' ratings for about 18,000 movies) was about 65Gb in size — too large to be read into the standard in-memory data model of open-source R directly. But in the video below, Brian Lewis shows us how to use the sparse Matrix object in R to efficiently store the data (about 99 million actual movie ratings) and the irlba package (which features a fast and efficient SVD algorithm for big data) to perform SVD analysis on the Netflix data in R.

< embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="273" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ipkuRqYT8_I?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450">  

Big Computing: Bryan Lewis's Vignette on IRLBA for SVD in R

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