2009 UC San Diego Data Mining Contest

The winners have been identified; check the results tab for information. Also, we have reopened the site for continued participation.

Welcome to the 2009 UCSD Data Mining Contest sponsored by FICO.

FICO has sponsored the data mining contest since 2004, which provides undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to test out their data mining skills on a real-world data set. FICO pioneered the use of predictive modeling to represent and explain the underlying relationships in data and make predictions and classifications about future events.

This year's contest consists of two classification tasks based on e-commerce transaction anomaly data. The first task is to maximize accuracy of binary classification on a test data set, given a fully labeled training data set. The performance metric is the lift at 20% review rate. The second task is similar to task 1, but provides a couple of additional fields that have potential predictive information.

FICO and UCSD will award prizes to first, second and third place winners in four categories: Task 1 undergraduate; Task 1 graduate; Task 2 undergraduate and Task 2 graduate. There is a total of $4,000 in prize money for each task, for a total of $8,000.

We launched the contest on May 15, 2009. The contest will end July 15, 2009. The contest is international. All current undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers studying full-time, in residence at an accredited university or college may compete for prizes. Others may compete but will not be eligible for prizes.