Assassinator Wrote:

Senseito7 Wrote:Alas, the percentage does give an idea at least? Its just oversaturated or plain inaccurate?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation

Pretty much what they do is... for all the anime wee have in common, take my ratings as a set of X's, your ratings as a set of Y's, and find the correlation.  1 = perfect correlation, 0 = no correlation, -1 = perfect negative correlation.

If you plot all the X's vs all the Y's, you get some sort of plot.  Basically, look at the 1st line of that picture I posted a few posts above, that should give you an idea of the kind of plots and what correlation you'll get.




tl;dr:

Positive correlation is pretty much "you like stuff I like", negative correlation is pretty much "you like stuff I hate". Problem is that anime isn't really random data, and generally most people like good anime, and most people don't really like bad anime, so most people end up liking and hating similar stuff, and that's a positive correlation.   And it's pretty unlikely to get negative correlation (you'd have to hate stuff that I like. So if I like all the good stuff, you have to hate them).

MyAnimeList decided to make the -1 to 1 scale into a 0 to 1 scale, so -1 becomes 0 (0%), 0 becomes 0.5 (50%) and 1 is still 1 (100%).  So a 50% "compatibility" is actually 0 correlation.  And since it's pretty unlikely for the correlation to be negative, it's pretty hard to get lower than 50% compatibility, and so our 62% isn't as good as it sounds.



... All that is if I understood everything correctly.