Which movies did 305344 fail to rate?

Originally posted to a previous version of this blog 27 April 2007.

I expected that the 117 movies not rated by someone or something that seems to rate every movie would have few raters and an earliest rating date close to the cutoff date for the data. That would be consistent with a rating program of some sort that scores the entire database periodically. This did not prove to be the case. The list of movies customer 305344 failed to rate includes Dr. Shivago, Citizen Kane and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Unlike most of the recent questions, this one cannot be looked up in the rater signature or the movie signature because this information has been summarized away. Instead I used a query on the original training data that has all the rating transactions. Later, I looked up the earliest rating date for each movie not rated by the alpha movie geek to test my hypothesis that they would be movies only recently made available for rating.


select t.movid from
(select r.movid as movid, sum(custid=305344) as geek
from netflix.train r
group by movid) t
where t.geek = 0


The most rated movies not rated by the alpha rater geek

title	n_raters	earliest
Mystic River	143,682	2003-09-20
Collateral	132,237	2004-05-10
Sideways	117,270	2004-10-22
The Notebook	115,990	2004-05-19
Ray	108,606	2004-10-22
The Aviator	108,354	2004-11-30
Million Dollar Baby	102,861	2004-11-16
Hotel Rwanda	92,345	2004-12-09
The Hunt for Red October	83,249	1999-12-17
12 Monkeys	76,475	1999-12-30
Crash	65,074	2005-04-14
Citizen Kane	61,758	2001-03-17
The Saint	28,448	2000-01-05
Doctor Zhivago	17,785	2000-01-12
Hackers	17,452	2000-01-06
The Grapes of Wrath	16,392	2001-03-18
The Pledge	10,969	2001-01-21
A Charlie Brown Christmas	7,546	2000-08-03
The Tailor of Panama	7,421	2001-03-28
The Best Years of Our Lives	7,031	2000-01-06