Oz Analytics: What Are Analytic Marketplaces?

The Naked analyst Episode 9 looks at the best places for analytic competitions.

Here are my top 4 sites. They range from the the well known to some more specialist sites. There are 3 marketplaces I know of, and a 'world championship' currently running.

Kaggle

Kaggle is the world's largest community of data scientists. They compete with each other to solve complex data science problems, and the top competitors are invited to work on the most interesting and sensitive business problems from some of the world’s biggest companies through Masters competitions. Their most famous competition to date was run for netflix where a prize of $1 million was awarded. Details of the winning team and how they did it can be found here.

Innocentive

Claims to have a global network of millions of problem solvers, a proven challenge methodology, and cloud-based innovation management platform combine to help their clients transform their economics of innovation through rapid solution delivery and the development of sustainable open innovation programs. Clients have included Astra Zeneca, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cleveland Clinic, Eli Lilly & Company, NASA, Nature Publishing Group, Procter & Gamble, Scientific American, Syngenta, The Economist, Thomson Reuters, and the US Department of Defense.

Topcoder

Also claims to be the world’s largest Crowdsourcing Development, Design, and Data Science Platform. The [topcoder] community gathers the world’s experts in design, development and data science to work on interesting and challenging problems for fun and reward.

Texata

The Big Data Analytics World Championship is run by the Professional Services Champions League (PSCL) and involves two online qualification rounds and a Live World Finals event held in Texas, USA in November 2014. Participants from more than 100 countries will compete individually in two online qualification rounds.

They also run other ‘world championships’ such as ModelOff (Financial Modeling World Championships) and LoyaltyGames (Loyalty and Gamification World Championships).