Movie discovery and recommendations

As a side effect of digging into the Netflix Prize data I created a set of flash applications. For a long time I was the only user, but I am not that beyond. I finished it up lately and it is ready to share. It has colors and all. Users should like it.

I launched it under the name "The Galaxy of Movies". What's inside: two ways of visualizing similar movies, a 2D recommender system, and a quiz game.

Features: interactive 2d maps, search, filtering by classic and experimental genres, recommendations for two people, option of importing ratings. The application is self-contained, and is smaller than 150k together with all data. The recommendations are built-in, calculated within the flash application, without having a specialized server.




I named the six most contributing features (hidden genres) learned by the regularized SVD, creating a set of 12 new, experimental genres (after discretizing) - they can be used to filter the movies:
* Realism vs. Idealization
* Safety vs. Surprise
* Fairy Tale vs. Distrust
* Feminism vs. Testosterone
* Innocence vs. Heroism
* Growing up vs. Journey

From the point of view of rating prediction those new genres carry much more information (allow to better assess if you will like the movie) than the standard genres, like Comedy, Drama, etc.