Kaggle, competitions and competitive intelligence

[Heath Gibson]

Today, economist and blogger Nicholas Gruen announced that he had become chairman of Kaggle.com. Kaggle is a service that allows companies to run data-modelling and prediction competitions. Two type of competitions are supported – competitions to predict the past and competitions to predict the future.

“Predicting the past requires contestants to build models that are evaluated against a past event (the idea being that highly performing models can then be adopted by the competition host) … Predicting the future requires contestants to make predictions about a future event. Organizations may then choose to act on predictions made by contestants who have a history of forecasting accurately. ” (Kaggle.com 14/04/2010)

Nicholas cites a couple of sources of inspiration for Kaggle. First is the Netflix Prize, where an online movie provider offered $1m to whoever could improve it’s movie recommendation algorithm by 10%. Second is Innocentive, a service that enables companies to post technical and business challenges online, with cash rewards for the best answers received. Kaggle also seems to borrow a little from prediction market sites like Intrade, especially with respect to its competitions for predicting the future.

So why should those with an interest in competitive intelligence (CI) be interested in Kaggle?

Read the rest of this post at http://minimalstate.com/2010/04/14/kaggle-competitions-and-competit...