My brother and I aren't that great at picking movies. I decided to fix that!

Basically, every Friday night, my family watches a movie. My brother and I often have difficulty picking one, so I wrote this R script to automate the process of looking through IMDB, weighing the genres, their appeal to my parents, and etc.

This script allows you to input the ratings of individual family members, with weights, for movies you've seen. Then, based on the genres, cast, writers, etc of that movie, it will filter and rank IMDB's database of movies for you to peruse. NOTE: The script itself isn't very modular at this point, and it has MANY hard-coded constants that I'll remove soon.

Well, I don't have many datapoints from my family yet, since we've only watched 2 movies since I started working on this script (but not since I completed it). For what it's worth, I've graphed the results of the algorithm I use to rank movies against the ratings our family gave movies we've watched. Take a look:

This graph makes it pretty evident that the data points we've gathered are very sparse so far. If we ignore the ratings my family gives, we can see a much more digestible view of the ratings the algorithm produces:

Here, we can see the clear distinction between movies who have a high appeal to my family's interests (i.e., genres, writers, directors, cast, etc), which have an immediate leg up, and movies that get on the charts by simply being popular and highly acclaimed.

Using this R script is relatively convoluted at the moment. However, its results are easy to interpret: a CSV file of the top 200 IMDB movies, ranked by their combined audience score and taste relevance. The results will look like this:

      tconst        primaryTitle startYear                 genres averageRating    score
1: tt0099685          Goodfellas      1990  Biography,Crime,Drama           8.7 19.48013
2: tt1675434    The Intouchables      2011 Biography,Comedy,Drama           8.5 19.02272
3: tt0253474         The Pianist      2002  Biography,Drama,Music           8.5 18.99665
4: tt0268978    A Beautiful Mind      2001        Biography,Drama           8.2 18.74277
5: tt0264464 Catch Me If You Can      2002  Biography,Crime,Drama           8.1 18.62060

Next, I want to work on an extension to the core engine that parses the output CSV, producing a more human readable form that my family can browse. This could take the form of a full-fledged web app or a simple CSV to PDF script. I also want to minimize and/or explain the usage of certain constants I threw into the algorithm.