Sunday, April 12, 2009

Rare Movies

I was playing around with Criticker and an interesting idea came to me. When Criticker makes a guess of how much someone would like a movie, it takes the scores of the 1000 people that agree that person the most, finds the ones that have seen some movie, and then takes the top 10 of those to create a prediction.

When looking at a movie, it lists all other people using Criticker that have seen it, but only shows the TCI scores (the measure of how much someone agrees with someone else) for those in that persons top 1000. Therefore, if TCI scores are only shown for say 2 people, then that means out of 1000 people, only 2 have seen it.

So I got to thinking, 1000 people is, statistically, a pretty good sized group. Therefore having just two out of 1000 see a movie means that 0.2% of the population have seen the movie, with a margin of error of 3%. This lead me to wondering, which movies have I seen, that the fewest number of people have seen. There are of course of number of problems in terms of selection bias using this method, but I can deal with it.

The 30 movies I have seen that the fewest number of Criticker users in my top 1000 have thought of ranking (bolded, movies I recommend seeing):
The Baker - 0.1%
Benji the Hunted - 0.1%
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying - 0.2%
Reckless Kelly - 0.2%
The King and the Clown - 0.3%
Animals are Beautiful People - 0.4%
The Cocoanuts - 0.4%

Felix the Cat: the Movie - 0.4%
The Princess Blade - 0.5%
The Wraith - 0.5%
The Court Jester - 0.7%
Norma Rae - 0.7%
Hellbound - 0.8%
Larger than Life - 1.1%
So Close - 1.1%
Monkey Business - 1.3%
Welcome to Dongmakgol - 1.3%
Guys and Dolls - 1.4%
Boxing Helena - 1.5%
I Love You to Death - 1.6%
Ned Kelly - 1.6%
The Black Hole - 1.8%
Fantastic Planet - 1.8%
For Richer or Poorer - 1.8%
Animal Crackers - 2.0%
The Legend of 1900 - 2.2%

Strictly Ballroom - 2.3%
Vanity Fair - 2.4%
Young Einstein - 2.4%
Six-String Samurai - 2.5%

1 comment:

ronald said...

i love fantastic planet!