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Kaggle Competitions Update


 
  
2 new competitions launched: identify handwriting and avoid overfitting.


Kaggle
Tuesday, 1st March 2011 For those looking for some practice before the $3 million Heritage Health Prize, we've just launched two new competitions.

The first requires participants to develop an algorithm that can identify handwriting. Such algorithms are important in the forensics world, where they are used to detect forgery. The competition is associated with the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, to be held in Beijing in September.

The second is hosted by Phil Brierley, winner of the tourism 2 competition and author of the Tiberius predictive modeling software. Phil has noticed that it's often the case that the person who is leading on the public leaderboard, doesn't win because they have overfit their model. Phil has setup a competition with a simulated dataset particularly designed to give participants practice at not overfitting.

Recent Results Since our last newsletter, the RTA competition and the Melbourne University competition have closed.

The RTA competition, requiring participants to predict travel time on Sydney's M4 freeway, was our biggest competition so far, attracting 364 teams.

There's a nice writeup of the competition on ZDNet Australia.

For more information, visit www.kaggle.com


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