title: Best way to use actors when predicting a movie rating
body: <p>So I'm trying to predict movie ratings based on several variables. I would like to include actors because that has a pretty large impact on the success of a movie. I've come up with several options. </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Get the top 5 actors for each movie. Just have a unique integer that represents those actors and use that. I'm worried there are too many unique actors for a model to use this effectively though. </p></li>
  <li><p>Take an average of all ratings of the movies that the actor performs in and use it like a key performance indicator. Have 5 separate columns for the top 5 actors in the movie with the KPI of each actor in the column.</p></li>
  <li><p>Same as two except instead of five separate columns, combine them into a single value for the movie. </p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I'm thinking option two will be best. Is there a better way to go about this? If anyone has had any similar experiences I would love to hear how you solved it. </p>