First Milestone

The time has now been and gone for submitting an entry for the first milestone, and the chance to win either $30,000 or $20,000 for the top two places.

The images below are the state of play (on the 30% visible data!) just after the first milestone ( I didn't capture this image in time so some teams have made an extra submission since).

There was a bit of movement in the last 2 days.

• Tom & Jerry changed their name to reveal themselves (Petterson & Caetano). This was interesting for me as they are from a relatively new machine learning lab here in Australia that I had not been aware of. They jumped up to 3rd position before the last submission but were overhauled at the last minute
•  Willem Mestrom made a big leap on his last submission to get into 3rd position. He was obviously keeping his best (or was he?) until the very last moment. This might be a good tactical play if he looking towards the $3 million rather than the short term smaller prizes.
• Planet Melbourne, after making consistent daily submissions throughout the competition did not take the opportunity to make one last submission.
• It is good to see Chris R still in the top 10. Chris has been up there since the very start.Interestingly Chris was cut off from submitting for a while due to Hurricane Irene taking his power away.

 Interestingly, positions 2,3 & 4 are now taken by members of The Ensemble from Netflix fame. Position 1 contains Dave, who was in an original team called Ensemble Team, and also entered Netflix as a member of Ensemble Experts , and I (also a member of Market Makers) ran a competition on Ensembling the Netflix Data and have looked at ensembling other competitions.
There seems to be a pattern here!

 

Note you can click on the images to enlarge them.

The plot below shows the Lowess line fit of the error as a function of the number of entries submitted.

First Milestone Just Around the Corner

There is about 4 days to go until the deadline for the first milestone, so I thought it would be interesting to capture the leaderboard now and then in 4 days, to see if things change wildly. At this stage it can be like a game of poker.

All the top 10 teams are still in the hunt and making daily submissions. Tom & Jerry were late starters but have made astonishing progress to 3rd place. They currently split 3 others who were part of 'The Ensemble', Edward, Willem and B.Yang.

So many teams at the top all have a proven history in data mining competitions. I will be very happy  if those ensemble dudes repeat their performance in the Netflix Prize ;-).
 

1 minute of fame

The HHP competition and Kaggle are catching the attention of the media over here in Australia.


I was on TV recently (and yes, it does add a few Kg to you),


http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3296837.htm


and in the paper (2nd last paragraph interesting!),


http://www.smh.com.au/business/miners-of-a-different-kind-in-line-for-riches-of-their-own-20110731-1i6bi.html


Blog posts may be limited in the next 2 weeks as its nose down to try and catch Edward.