THE PUZZLOR
Movie stars
By John Toczek
Retailers invest heavily in predicting how customers will rate new productions such as movies, books, games and appliances. Accurate recommendations lead to increased revenue and happier customers. To make these recommendations, retailers look for correlations between different products in order to make suggestions on what other products a customer might like.
Table 1: Customer ratings.
Table 1 shows movie ratings from five customers for five movies. The ratings range from 1 to 5. A rating of 5 indicates that the movie was very highly liked and a rating of 1 indicates that it was not liked at all. One movie rating is missing because Evan has not yet seen the movie “Prognosis Negative.”
Question:
Using only the data in Table 1, what is the most likely rating that Evan will give to the movie “Prognosis Negative”?
Send your answer to puzzlor@gmail.com by Dec. 15. The winner, chosen randomly from correct answers, will receive an “O.R.: The Science of Better” T-shirt. Congratulations to Bart Bennett for correctly solving June’s “Matchmaker” PuzzlOR. Past questions can be found at puzzlor.com.
John Toczek is the manager of Decision Support and Analytics for ARAMARK Corporation in the Global Risk Management group. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at Drexel University (1996) and a master’s degree in operations research from Virginia Commonwealth University (2005).
