The international "kaggle" data science competition for the really smart focuses on China in its new challenge that offers a top prize of $12,500.
This latest kaggle contest asks kagglers, or members of the kaggle community, to predict the gender and age of mobile device users in China based on their app download and usage behaviors. It runs until Sept. 5.
The top three teams will share a prize pool of $25,000. Contestants will earn kaggle ranking points and results count towards the Kaggle progression system in which kagglers move from Novice, through Contributor, Expert and Master to Grandmaster.
Kaggle is probably one of the most popular algorithmic and data science contests in the world. The word kaggle itself is an algorithmically generated word, said Anthony Goldbloom, who founded kaggle in 2010.
Kaggle is a platform for predictive modeling and analytics. It's a competition that's grown to a community of over half a million registered users. Counted as kagglers are members of Google's DeepMind team and those working on IBM Watson.
Kaggle gives organizations the opportunity to host competitions to solve problems that would otherwise require in-house experts. It helps organizations solve real world problems by crowdsourcing experts.
The host in this latest kaggle is Talking Data, China's largest third-party mobile data platform. Talking Data claims to have 70% of the 500 million mobile devices active daily in China.
The firm wants to understand behavioral data to help brand advertisers pursue data-driven marketing efforts better targeted to their mainland customers.
The challenge is to build a model predicting the demographic characteristics of Talking Data users based on their app usage, geolocation and mobile device properties using data sets, which are supplied. Talking Data's partner in this kaggle is the machine learning platform Turi (formerly GraphLab).
Talking Data said this challenge is a groundbreaking attempt "due to the relatively isolated Internet environment in China. For the international contestants, this is also a unique chance to examine complex Chinese mobile device data, which is a rare opportunity outside of the country."
You can visit the kaggle website here to learn more about it.