This year’s KDD Cup contest is similar in style to the Netflix competition, except 1st place is only $5000 instead of a million. Bummer. But it still seems like a fun contest.

There are two parts. The first track attempts to predict user music ratings and the second track tries to predict whether or not a user will rate a particular track at all. Contestants can choose either track or both.

The deadline for the KDD cup is June 30th, 2011.

-Lyndie Chiou

Always a sucker for contests!

There’s a tax day visualization contest on datavizchallenge.org. The challenge is to visualize how politicians are spending your tax dollars. The deadline for submission is tax day, April 18th, 2011.

The website providing the details, whatwepayfor.com, has done a nice job providing the data and an interface for extracting slices of data in real time via http urls.

First prize wins $5000 and another $5000 goes to discretionary awards… Good luck!

-Lyndie Chiou

I’m a sucker for competitions with lots of prize money… So I went fishing on the web looking for data mining contests. I only found three results – do you know of any others? Comment on this post and I can update the list for everyone. Here’s the competitions I found:

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.

-Lyndie Chiou