Netflix prize dataset?

Question

Hi, I am looking to work on a machine learning project for my course and I would like to use the netflix prize dataset? But it looks like the contest is closed and the dataset is not available for download in the netflix website. Does anyone who wokred on it has the dataset? If so ,can u share it?

Answer 1

If I remember correctly, distribution of the Netflix dataset probably had some restrictions on it such as redistribution. I think you had to sign a form to get access to the data, so I'm not certain it could be redistributed by anyone other than Netflix. You could just send them an email or ask on the Netflix Prize forum.

• http://www.netflixprize.com/community/

Answer 2

Update: The data set seems to have been removed from the UCI repository with no real explanation (see http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/noteNetflix.txt)

Maybe it has something to do with this: http://blog.netflix.com/2010/03/this-is-neil-hunt-chief-product-officer.html

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Now the contest is over, the training data and the test data used to evaluate the grand prize are available here at the UCI Machine Learning repository.

Answer 3

It seems that at http://warsteiner.db.cs.cmu.edu/db-site/Datasets/graphData/ the old data are still available.

Answer 4

The most recent contest was cancelled because some researchers were able to identify some supposedly anonymous users:

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11497

Additionally, someone has sued Netflix about being included in the dataset, because it may have revealed that person's sexual orientation:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/netflix-privacy-lawsuit/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Presumably and probably for the best for them, Netflix seems to have done a pretty good job about making the data unavailable.