Thursday, November 3, 2011

Data-diving for fun and profit

An article in the New York Times this morning — “A site for data scientists to prove their skills and make money” by Claire Cain Miller — got me really excited. She describes Kaggle, a start-up that has recently raised $11 million. Here is its proposition:

“Kaggle...has figured out a way to connect...companies with the mathematicians and scientists who crunch numbers for a living or a hobby. ... Here’s how it works. An organization runs a competition by proposing a riddle it needs answered and offering years of data. Anyone can enter to crunch the data and answer the riddle to win a cash prize.”

That sounds like an amazing opportunity for many of us in academics. One of the most difficult tasks in academy is getting one’s hands on data. And here they are making it available for free! And the prizes aren’t insignificant:

“Currently, a health plan is offering $3 million to someone who can take years of patients’ medical claim data and produce an equation to predict whether patients will be hospitalized in the next year, so doctors can try to intervene beforehand. ... A bank is offering $5000 to someone who can use credit score data to come up with a better way to predict whether someone who receives a loan will enter financial distress in the next two years.”

They also have something called Kaggle In Class. This allows professors to submit competitions that then limit the participant pool to students in the class. In this case “prizes” are Kudos (and, of course, some grade for some assignment).

I signed up while reading the article.

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