The Grand-Daddy of Competitions in Analytics

Netflix created a stir back in 2006 when they announced a $1 million award for any software/algorithm that could do a better job of predicting what movies customers would like than their existing in-house software. The competition was a massive hit among data miners and thousands of teams from 186 countries participated in it.

The competition ran for 3 years and in true Hollywood style ended in a photo-finish. The two leading teams had passed the 10% improvement cut-off required by Netflix and were now battling for the top spot. The winning team, BellKor, presented its final submission 20 minutes before the deadline. Then, at the last minute, the second team made its last entry. The two were a dead tie, mathematically. But under contest rules, when there is a tie, the first team past the post wins. Those 20 minutes were worth one million dollars!

Now Heritage Provider Network have launched a competition with an even bigger “3 million dollar” prize money for a different kind of challenge, to improve the American healthcare system.

Studies have concluded that in 2006 well over $30 billion was spent on unnecessary hospital admissions. Each of these unnecessary admissions took away one hospital bed from someone
else who needed it more.

Is there a better way? Can we identify earlier those most at risk and ensure they get the treatment they need? HPN believes that the answer may be “yes” – but to do it will require harnessing the world’s top experts from many fields.

Heritage launched the $3 million Heritage Health Prize with one goal in mind: to develop a breakthrough algorithm that uses available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations.

Visit these sites for more details.

https://www.kaggle.com/c/hhp