IEEE ICDM Contest, 5K prize: predict city traffic

Data mining contest affiliated with IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2010 (ICDM) has started today. It is organized on TunedIT platform for data mining researchers and practitioners. The task is to predict city traffic based on measurements from Automatic Traffic Recorders or real-time notifications from in-car GPS navigators. Best solutions will be awarded with prizes worth 5,000 USD in total.

Competition web page: http://tunedit.org/challenge/IEEE-ICDM-2010

Over the last century, number of cars engaged in vehicular traffic in cities has increased rapidly, causing many difficulties for all citizens: traffic jams, large and unpredictable communication delays, pollution etc. Excessive traffic became a civilization problem that affects everyone who lives in a city of 50,000 or larger, anywhere in the world. Complexity of processes that stand behind traffic flow is so large, that only data mining algorithms - from the domains of structure mining, graph mining, data streams, large-scale and temporal data mining - may bring efficient solutions. With the proposed competition, we want to ask researchers to devise the best possible algorithms that tackle problems of traffic flow prediction, for the purpose of intelligent driver navigation and improved city planning.

There are 3 independent tasks. Each of them approaches the problem of traffic prediction from a different perspective and involves different types of data. The competition will last till September 6th, 2010.

The IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) has established itself as the world's premier research conference in data mining. The 10th edition of ICDM (ICDM '10) provides a leading forum for presentation of original research results, as well as exchange and dissemination of innovative, practical development experiences. The conference covers all aspects of data mining, including algorithms, software and systems, and applications. In addition, ICDM draws researchers and application developers from a wide range of data mining related areas such as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases and data warehousing, data visualization, knowledge-based systems, and high performance computing. ICDM 2010 will be held in Sydney, Australia on December 14-17.

TunedIT is a web platform for data mining researchers and practitioners. It delivers a set of tools - TunedIT Research - that facilitate experimental investigation and scientific collaboration in the field of data mining and machine learning, especially the automation of experiments and generation of reproducible experimental results. TunedIT comprises also the TunedIT Challenges platform for organization of data mining competitions, which was recently opened up for all professors and tutors who'd like to organize a contest for their student groups, instead of traditional assignments.

Marcin Wojnarski
Chair of the Organizing Committee of the contest