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Submission + - From movie recommendations to life and death (heritagehealthprize.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: The April 4 launch of the $3 million Heritage Health Prize was just announced by the Heritage Provider Network, a network of doctors. The competition challenges data hackers to build algorithms that predict who will go to hospital in the next year, so that preventative action can be taken. An algorithm might find that somebody with diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol is a 90 per cent risk for hospitalization. Knowing this, it might be cheaper for an HMO to enrol them in an exercise program now rather than pay the likely hospital bill. The competition takes the same approach as $1 million Netflix Prize, but solves a far more significant problem.
Math

Submission + - Gov 2.0 competition to predict commute times (kaggle.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: Last week, Sydney's Minister of Roads, David Borger, launched a $10,000 competition to develop an algorithm that predicts commute times on a major Sydney freeway. The winning algorithm will be used to power predictions on the Sydney live traffic website. The hope is that the predictions will help commuters make informed decisions about when to travel and on what routes, lowering the intensity of peak hour traffic. In its first week, the competition attracted entries from more than 50 teams and 19 countries.

Submission + - Time to upgrade the Elo chess rating system (kaggle.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: About six weeks ago, Slashdot reported a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performed better than the official Elo rating system. The competition has just reached the halfway mark and the best entries have outperformed Elo by over 8 per cent. The leader is a Portrugese physicist, followed by an Israeli mathematician and then a pair of American computer scientists. The fact that Elo has been so comprehensively beaten is a sure sign that half a century after it was developed, it's due for an upgrade.
Classic Games (Games)

Chess Ratings — Move Over Elo 133

Posted by timothy from the checkmate-and-perhaps-match dept.
databuff writes "Less than 24 hours ago, Jeff Sonas, the creator of the Chessmetrics rating system, launched a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performs better than the official Elo rating system. The competition requires entrants to build their rating systems based on the results of more than 65,000 historical chess games. Entrants then test their algorithms by predicting the results of another 7,809 games. Already three teams have managed create systems that make more accurate predictions than the official Elo approach. It's not a surprise that Elo has been outdone — after all, the system was invented half a century ago before we could easily crunch large amounts of historical data. However, it is a big surprise that Elo has been bettered so quickly!"

Submission + - Chess ratings - move over Elo (kaggle.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: Less than 24 hours ago, Jeff Sonas, the creator of the Chessmetrics rating system, launched a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performs better than the official Elo rating system. The competition requires entrants to build their rating systems based on the results of more than 65,000 historical chess games. Entrants then test their algorithms by predicting the results of another 7,809 games. Already three teams have managed create systems that make more accurate predictions than the official Elo approach. It's not a surprise that Elo has been outdone — after all, the system was invented half a century ago before we could easily crunch large amounts of historical data. However, it is a big surprise that Elo has been bettered done so quickly!

Submission + - World Cup forecasting challenge (kaggle.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: As a break from projecting the strength of subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and other obscure financial instruments, quantitative analysts at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS and Danske Bank have modeled the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Now Kaggle has set up a forecasting competition, allowing statisticians to go head-to-head with these corporate giants. The challenge is to predict how far each country will progress in the tournament. If the banks know as much about soccer as they do about subprime mortgages, the statisticians are in with a good chance.

Submission + - Google launches a data prediction API (google.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: Google has released a data prediction a prediction API. The service helps users leverage historical data to make predictions that can guide real-time decisions. According to Google, the API can be used for prediction tasks ranging from product recommendations to churn analysis (predicting which customers are likely to switch to another provider). The API involves three simple steps, upload the data, train the model and then generate predictions. The API is currently available on an invitation only basis.

Submission + - Crowdsourcing HIV research

Submitted by biolgeek
biolgeek writes: In recent years, HIV has been managed with a collection of therapies. However, the virus will likely evolve around these drugs, making it crucially important to get a better understanding of the virus itself. An important step in understanding the virus is to get a handle on its genetic blueprint. William Dampier of Drexler University is taking a novel approach to this research by crowdsourcing his problem. He is hosting a bioinformatics competition, which requires contestants to find markers in the HIV sequence that predict a change in the severity of the infection (as measured by viral load). So far the best entry comes from Fontanelles, an HIV research group, who has been able to predict a change in viral load with 66 per cent accuracy.

Comment Re:Quality not quantity (Score 1) 69

by databuff (#31852290) Attached to: A Crowdsourcing Project To Make Predictions More Precise
Great comments, thanks! To address the your most incisive comments (as I see them) c) Competitions on Kaggle aren't polls. Competitions are framed in a way that requires serious data analysis. For example the Eurovision Forecasting Comp requires contestants to forecast the voting matrix (who votes for who) rather than a simple who will win. b,d,e) getting people to do lots of predictions should seperate the talented from the lucky. Having forecasters predict in the same place over and over is a good way to get long enough history to discover the trully talented.

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