[ml] Fwd: Forgery Detection, Overfitting and Recent Results

[Mike Schachter]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anthony Goldbloom | Kaggle <anthony.goldbloom at kaggle.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 12:04 PM
Subject: Forgery Detection, Overfitting and Recent Results
To: mike at mindmech.com


  [image: Kaggle Update]
  *Tuesday, 1st March 2011*
  New Competitions

 For those looking for some practice before the $3 million Heritage Health
Prize, we've just launched two new competitions.

 The first requires participants to develop an algorithm that can identify
handwriting<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=51983b1ef8&e=bf02f945c6>.
Such algorithms are important in the forensics world, where they are used to
detect forgery. The competition is associated with the International
Conference on Document Analysis and
Recognition<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=b334ae28ef&e=bf02f945c6>,
to be held in Beijing in September.

The second is hosted by Phil Brierley, winner of the tourism 2 competition
and author of the
Tiberius<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=7316cca577&e=bf02f945c6>predictive
modeling software. Phil has noticed that it's often the case that
the person who is leading on the public leaderboard, doesn't win because
they have overfit their model. Phil has setup a competition with a simulated
dataset<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=1a7db52a41&e=bf02f945c6>,
particularly
designed to give participants practice at not overfitting.

 Recent Results

Since our last newsletter, the RTA competition and the Melbourne University
competition have closed.

 The RTA competition<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=29cef9c92b&e=bf02f945c6>,
requiring participants to predict travel time on Sydney's M4 freeway, was
our biggest competition so far, attracting 364 teams. The winners were José
Pablo González<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=b282ffce51&e=bf02f945c6>,
a PhD student at Carnegie Melon University and Guido Matias
Cortes<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=67f2f73d17&e=bf02f945c6>,
a PhD student at the University of British Columbia. Congratulations also to
Sergey Yurgenson and Alisson Azzolini who finished second and third. There's
a nice writeup of the competition on
ZDNet<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=95392d1900&e=bf02f945c6>
.

 The Melbourne University
competition<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=27a4fbc35f&e=bf02f945c6>,
which had participants predict which grant applications would be successful,
was won by Kaggle's own Jeremy Howard (he entered before he joined Kaggle).
However, he was ineligible, so Quan
Sun<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=c12f39d848&e=bf02f945c6>,
a PhD student at Waikato University in New Zealand collected the prize.
Third placed went to Yuanchen He, a senior engineer at McAfee. Each has
posted their methodogy on the Kaggle blog
(Jeremy<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=7266074157&e=bf02f945c6>,
Quan
<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=f2c792557c&e=bf02f945c6>and
Yuanchen<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=9356a7b8d7&e=bf02f945c6>
).
   Visit Kaggle<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=68bd8eeb0a&e=bf02f945c6>today,
or discover more about Kaggle and read interesting articles at No
Free Hunch<http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=35f6665e21&e=bf02f945c6>,
our regularly-updated blog.
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