Objective

• Gran Torino and Harry Brown are similar movies. If you like one, you may like the other¹. The similarity is not based on “similar users” rating both the movies highly (though that could be happening), but is based on the fact that both the movies involve a lonely, retired person with a military background takes the responsibbility of delivering justice to those who have been wronged in their own hands.

• Given a movie, recommend other movies that have similar plots.

Solution

• Wikipedia dump of movie pages was used to extract movie plots. The topics were identified using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and KL-Divergence was used to find out similar movies.

• Although we didn’t get great results, the struggle did help us in getting some interesting insights into the problem.

• The data source, methodology, discussion of results and error analysis is available in the report here

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¹ both great movies btw, you’ll probably like them both in any case but I have to make a point here.