Data Mining and Forecasting Competitions

Crowdsourcing data modeling is an effective way to build predictive algorithms. There are any number of approaches that can be applied to a data modeling problem, but it is impossible to know at the outset which will be most effective.

A consultant or in-house statisitician can try a few, but opening up the problem to a wider audience ensures that organizations reach the frontier of what is possible from a given dataset.

Kaggle is an innovative platform for data modeling and prediction competitions. Companies, governments and researchers present datasets and problems – the world's best data scientists then compete to produce the best solutions. At the end of a competition, the competition host pays prize money in exchange for the intellectual property behind the winning model.

Data scientists rarely have access to real-world data. This is frustrating when you consider that many of the world's organizations have piles of data that they can't make the most of.

Kaggle corrects this mismatch by giving data scientists access to real-world data and problems. Best of all, the burden of collecting, cleaning and structuring the data will have been done by others.

Go to http://kaggle.com