This stuff is great. The rewards/prizes for the best model are so minimal compared to what it usually costs to build a great model via a consulting contract or hiring a high quality miner.
Similar to Mechanical Turk, we've managed to create a completely different value structure for some amazing work by smart folks... mostly by making it a competition. Great exposure for winners, sure, but these prizes are pretty minimal.
http://www.kaggle.com/c/GiveMeSomeCredit, for example, has a total basket of US$5K (only US$3K for first place) for a model predicting credit scores (in this case, likelihood to default or have financial distress). Folks I talk to who do this type of work professionally tend to charge far more than that to create these models.
For the company sharing this data, of course, big win: They get a cheap, potentially fantastic new model, and the creator gets some good exposure and some cash. But if these take off, they can really change the economics of how this work is created.
Similar to Mechanical Turk, we've managed to create a completely different value structure for some amazing work by smart folks... mostly by making it a competition. Great exposure for winners, sure, but these prizes are pretty minimal.
http://www.kaggle.com/c/GiveMeSomeCredit, for example, has a total basket of US$5K (only US$3K for first place) for a model predicting credit scores (in this case, likelihood to default or have financial distress). Folks I talk to who do this type of work professionally tend to charge far more than that to create these models.
For the company sharing this data, of course, big win: They get a cheap, potentially fantastic new model, and the creator gets some good exposure and some cash. But if these take off, they can really change the economics of how this work is created.