1. Of course, round 1 of the Netflix competition has ended, but did you know there’s a round 2 — also with a $1 million prize? Round 2 will be a time-limited contest involving sparse datasets. The full details for the Netflix 2 prize will be announced in the near future on their website. Once the contest has been officially started, it will have a progress prize at 6 months and then finish at 18 months.

2. There’s a statistical methods competition called the OMOP Cup: Method Competition. It’s organized by the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership. The purpose is to improve on current methods of utilizing real-time data to ensure drug safety. There are two parts to the competition (taken from the website):

• Challenge 1 explores how well your method works when provided an entire dataset, so the goal is accurate classification of which drugs are associated with which outcomes.
• Challenge 2 evaluates the timeliness of detection of drug-event associations by having your methods run against data sequentially as it accumulates over time.

The total prize money is $20,000. Visit the OMOP Cup: Method Competition website for full details.

3. Every year, KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data-Mining ) sponsors a data-mining competition with a cash prize of around $5000. The competition is usually announced in Spring, so apologies for mentioning it now – you will have to wait until 2010. You can look at info on past competitions here.