Kaggle Launches its First Competition

Since its inauguration in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest has transfixed millions of viewers worldwide with its bubblegum pop, ballads and quirks. During its tenure as one of the world's longest-running television programs, it has attracted its fair share of controversy, with claims that the voting outcomes don't simply reflect performance quality but are influenced by factors such as regional politics, expatriate populations and artists' sexual appeal. Patterns have appeared over time which support this hypothesis.

Contestants in Kaggle's Forecast Eurovision Voting competition will attempt to exploit these patterns to predict the voting for the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest. Entries must be submitted by May 24th - the eve of the Eurovision Song Contest. The winner will collect a $USD1,000 cash prize. And just as the Eurovision Song Contest has launched the high-flying careers of its own performers - notably ABBA and Celine Dion - forecasting accurately will land competitors a top ranking on Kaggle's league table.

Tell me more about Kaggle
Predictions are critical to most organizations. Retailers predict their sales to to optimize inventory; insurance companies predict which claims are candidates for fraud investigations; and fund managers predict asset prices to maximize their clients' wealth.

However, no single organization has access to all the best available data prediction talent. Moreover, it is normally a combination of many predictions that produces the most accurate forecasts, but no single organization can assemble a sufficiently large number of independent predictions. This is where Kaggle can help. Kaggle provides a platform for data-prediction competitions allowing organizations to make predictions they might never have thought possible.

Through Kaggle, organizations have access to the planet's best data-prediction talent. The platform allows companies, researchers, governments and other organizations to post their problems and have statisticians worldwide compete to predict the future (produce the best forecasts) or predict the past (find the best insights hiding in your data). Statisticians on Kaggle are rated and ranked based on past performance so you'll know who are the smartest people in the room.

Kaggle makes it possible for organizations to combine the predictions made by many statisticians. This is valuable because the 'collective intelligence' of many forecasts normally trumps individual predictions, even by the most skilled experts. The Netflix Prize, a $1m data-prediction competition to improve Netflix's movie recommendations, was won by a team of teams that combined 700 models!

Kaggle offers statisticians and data professionals who compete in these competitions the opportunity to test their skills and enhance their professional reputations. Kaggle will maintain rankings and ratings, which statisticians can use to demonstrate their ability.

Here's How it Works.