Slashdot Mirror
Netflix Announces Second Data Mining Contest
John Snodgrass writes "Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix, has announced on the Netflix Prize Forums that they are planning to hold a new data mining competition. The second competition will have some twists and is expected to be shorter in duration. It will feature two grand prizes, to be awarded in a 6 and 18 month time frame. A previous competitor still active on the board has already dubbed it: 'The Sparse Matrix: Reordered' and 'The Sparse Matrix: Factorizations.'"
> Why do tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work just for the chance that you might get payed? It seems absurd.
Challenge and notoriety.
For that matter, just about everything you do has a chance of failure, so why do anything?
=Smidge=
Most of the time people want to tinker/play with concepts. They just need some sort of motivation to get them going. The chance that you might get payed is apparently enough for some people.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Most of these are research groups that would publish their results and research anyway. This gives them a practical application and a chance for some fame and money -- the research still gets done and published.
I'll add one more thing. Netflix has done the community a favor by providing a large dataset for testing algorithms. Data mining requires data. It requires more than just raw data. It is really difficult to know how well your algorithm works without data that has known answers to compare to. A good test dataset lets you compare your results to other results.