Peerside

As most modern data wranglers know - big data and machine learning are the new black and on everyone’s future career path whether they like it or not. The folks at UC San Diago along with FICO are running a data mining contest where the challenge is to maximise accuracy of binary classification of a provided ecommerce data set. The prizes are nothing like the famed Netflix treasure and it’s limited to college students but even then, like the contest flyer points out, the best way to really learn machine learning is with practical experience – learn by doing.

So, if you’re interested read the contest flyer below and check out the 2009 UCSD Data Mining Contest home page

Welcome to the 2009 UCSD Data Mining Contest sponsored by FICO.

FICO has sponsored the data mining contest since 2004, which provides undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to test out their data mining skills on a real-world data set. FICO pioneered the use of predictive modelling to represent and explain the underlying relationships in data and make predictions and classifications about future events.

This year's contest consists of two classification tasks based on e-commerce transaction anomaly data. The first task is to maximize accuracy of binary classification on a test data set, given a fully labelled training data set. The performance metric is the lift at 20% review rate. The second task is similar to task 1, but provides a couple of additional fields that have potential predictive information.

FICO and UCSD will award prizes to first, second and third place winners in four categories: Task 1 undergraduate; Task 1 graduate; Task 2 undergraduate and Task 2 graduate. There is a total of $4,000 in prize money for each task, for a total of $8,000.

We launched the contest on May 15, 2009. The contest will end July 15, 2009. The contest is international. All current undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers studying full-time, in residence at an accredited university or college may compete for prizes. Others may compete but will not be eligible for prizes.

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• The UCSD Data Mining Contest offers students a chance to test their data mining skill on a real-world data set.
• Teams will compete to build a system that correctly classifies data from an e-commerce website.
  See the datasets page for details.
• There are many reasons to participate:
  1. Practical experience is the best way to learn.
  2. Success in the competition looks great on a resume (graduate admissions, jobs, fellowships).
• Participating is easy, and we encourage everyone to try!
• The flyer for this competition.
• The contest forum is now up and running. Learn from others and get your own ideas out there!