Abstract
Several complex tasks that arise in organizations
can be simplified by mapping them into a matrix
completion problem. In this paper, we address
a key challenge faced by our company: predicting the efficiency of artists in rendering visual effects (VFX) in film shots. We tackle this challenge by using a two-fold approach: first, we transform this task into a constrained matrix completion
problem with entries bounded in the unit interval
[0, 1]; second, we propose two novel matrix factorization models that leverage our knowledge of
the VFX environment. Our first approach, expertise matrix factorization (EMF), is an interpretable
method that structures the latent factors as weighted
user-item interplay. The second one, survival matrix factorization (SMF), is instead a probabilistic
model for the underlying process defining employees’ efficiencies. We show the effectiveness of our
proposed models by extensive numerical tests on
our VFX dataset and two additional datasets with
values that are also bounded in the [0, 1] interval