Australian Data Mining conference (AusDM09) will be held in Melbourne next December and Dr Phil Brierley of Tiberius Data Mining has put out the call for proposals for an analytic challenge to accompany the conference. Competitions are quite popular in data mining circles and provide a good training ground for new practitioners to get access to real data and solve real problems. They also often have surprising results, such as the team who used laptop with 2GB RAM to beat IBM’s mighty clusters.
For businesses, this is a great opportunity to find out what is available by having others suggest new ideas and methods, or even to test your internally deployed models against the best of the best. So if you’re a business who has data, please consider being invloved! For further details, see the competition webpage.
2 responses so far ↓
1 phil // Jul 9, 2009 at 11:48 am
Hi Shane,
Thanks for the plug.
Just a minor correction, Uni Melb did fantastic, but didn’t actually beat IBM. The rules stated you could only win one prize, otherwise IBM would have won both tracks. see…
http://www.kddcup-orange.com/winners.php?page=slow
You can actually read what IBM did, which was basically the same as what most people were trying [including Oldham Athletic Reserves ;-(]
but they just had more grunt.
2 Shane Butler // Jul 13, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Ok thanks for the correction Phil!