News

The KDD-Cup 2000 focused on web mining, using clickstream and purchase 
data from Gazelle.com, a legwear and legcare web retailer.
The Cup was extremely well organized by Carla Brodley and Ronny Kohavi.

An ironic turn of the Cup is that Gazelle.com went out of business
on August 18.  Could they survive if they had the results earlier?
Perhaps not, but in the process of the analysis the participants and
the community have learned important lessons about questioning the initial
finding, asking the right questions, and dealing with sequences.

The KDD-Cup questions involved both accuracy of predictions and
business insights.  Over 170 participants have entered the competition,
but only about 35 have submitted the answers.

Here are the questions and the winners.  Honorable mentions were given
to participants whose results were close to the winners.

KDD Cup 2000 Winners:

Question 1:
Given a set of page views, will the visitor view another
page on the site or will the visitor leave?

Winner: Amdocs

Honorable Mentions: Mui Seug Martin Lee, Chong Jin Ong and S. Sathiya
Keerthi of Mechanical and Production Engineering Department, National
University of Singapore


Question 2:
Given a set of page views, which product brand will the
visitor view in the remainder of the session?

Winner: MP13 team of Alexei Vopilov, Ivan Shabalin and
Vladimir Mikheyev

Honorable Mentions: Mukund Deshpande, George Karypis, Department of
Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota

Question 3:
Given a set of purchases over a period of time, characterize visitors
who spend more than $12 (order amount) on an average order at the
site.

Winner: Salford Systems, Inc

Honorable Mentions: Orit Rafaely, Tel-Aviv University and Amdocs

Question 4

Given a set of page views, characterize killer pages, i.e., pages
after which users leave the site.

Winner: e-steam

Honorable Mentions: LLSoft, Ltd; Amdocs; and SAS

Question 5

Given a set of page views, characterize which product brand a visitor
will view in the remainder of the session?

Winner: Amdocs

The full results and explanations of the cup are
at see http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/KDDCUP/