R in Predictive Modeling Competitions - Anthony Goldbloom from Kaggle

I'm excited to announce our next DC R meetup on Tuesday 5/17 at 6:30pm with Anthony Goldbloom, the CEO of Kaggle (http://www.kaggle.com) - the data mining and predictive modeling competition site. I had the pleasure of meeting Anthony a few months ago at O'Reilly's Strata Conference (http://strataconf.com/strata2011) in the Bay Area, and we're lucky that he'll be in town in May. Many thanks to OPOWER (http://www.opower.com) for hosting us!

This is a very exciting and current topic. The $3 million Heritage Health Prize competition (http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/c/hhp)has gotten lots of media attention.

Please come at 6:30 to network and grab some food and drinks. We'll begin the program at 7:00.

Hope to see you there!

Abstract Predictive modeling competitions are shaping up to be the biggest thing in data science in 2011 - there are multi-million dollar prizes and vital scientific projects are being thrown open to competition for the first time. Anthony Goldbloom, Kaggle’s founder and CEO will describe the ideas underlying the competitions and discuss the use of R in building predictive models. Anthony will also give some hints about how to use R in the $3 million Heritage Health Prize.

Bio Anthony Goldbloom is the founder and chief executive officer of Kaggle. In just 12 months since launch, Mr Goldbloom's company has run competitions for companies like Ford, Deloitte and the Hearst Corporation. Kaggle is now running the $3 million Heritage Health Prize (http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/c/hhp), the largest data mining prize ever. Before founding Kaggle, Mr Goldbloom worked in the macroeconomic modelling areas of the Reserve Bank of Australia and before that the Australian Treasury. In these roles, Anthony was responsible for building macroeconomic models, generating economic forecasts and simulating the impact of changes in interest rates and fiscal policy on the Australian economy. Anthony holds a first class honors degree in economics and econometrics from the University of Melbourne and has published in The Economist and the Australian Economic Review.