Bayesian Approach to Users' Perspective on Movie Genres

Abstract

Movie ratings are crucial for recommendation engines that track the behavior of all users and utilize the information to suggest items the users might like. It is intuitively appealing that information about the viewing preferences in terms of movie genres is sufficient for predicting a genre of an unlabeled movie. In order to predict movie genres, we treat ratings as a feature vector, apply a Bernoulli event model to estimate the likelihood of a movie being assigned a certain genre, and evaluate the posterior probability of the genre of a given movie by using the Bayes rule. The goal of the proposed technique is to efficiently use movie ratings for the task of predicting movie genres. In our approach, we attempted to answer the question: “Given the set of users who watched a movie, is it possible to predict the genre of a movie on the basis of its ratings?” The simulation results with MovieLens 1M data demonstrated the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed technique, achieving an 83.8% prediction rate for exact prediction and 84.8% when including correlated genres.