Predicting movie audience with stacked generalization by combining machine learning algorithms

The Korea film industry has matured and the number of movie-watching per capita has reached the highest level in the world. Since then, movie industry growth rate is decreasing and even the total sales of movies per year slightly decreased in 2018. The number of moviegoers is the first factor of sales in movie industry and also an important factor influencing additional sales. Thus it is important to predict the number of movie audiences. In this study, we predict the cumulative number of audiences of films using stacking, an ensemble method. Stacking is a kind of ensemble method that combines all the algorithms used in the prediction. We use box o ffi ce data from Korea Film Council and web comment data from Daum Movie (www.movie.daum.net). This paper describes the process of collecting and preprocessing of explanatory variables and explains regression models used in stacking. Final stacking model outperforms in the prediction of test set in terms of RMSE.