Kaggle: Statisticians outperform Eurovision betting markets

In a show that ranged from a hip thrusting Moldovan saxophonist to a windpipe-backed Armenian singing about the apricot stone in her head, Germany's Lena captured the 55th Eurovision Song Contest. This result was a triumph for the five (out of 22) teams from Kaggle's Forecast Eurovision Voting competition that predicted Lena would win.

The winner of Kaggle's contest was Jure Zbontar, a 25 year old computer scientist from the University of Ljubiana (the capital of Slovenia). Hopefully we'll hear more from Jure over the next few days. Dr Derek Gatherer, a virologist from the University of Glasgow who submitted on behalf of the BBC's More or Less, finished runner up. See the full Forecast Eurovision Voting results.

How did the Kaggle consensus perform? The consensus tipped Lena to finish second behind runaway favourite Safura from Azerbaijan. Interestingly, Kaggle's statisticians outperformed the prediction markets, selecting seven of the countries that finished in the top ten, compared with five for the prediction markets.

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