Kaggle - Predicting a Biological Response

For our first meeting, we're going to get together and tackle one of Kaggle's competitions.

Kaggle.com is a site that offers data analysis challenges. Datasets are provided by researchers or commercial companies looking for people to develop predictive or analytical algorithms. Often, there is a prize for the winning team.

Here is the particular challenge we're going to tackle:

http://www.kaggle.com/c/bioresponse

The plan is to discuss ways we might go about tackling this problem. Namely, which visualizations would shed the most light on the problem and which algorithms are most likely to point us towards a good solution.

If there is another Kaggle challenge you'd like to tackle instead of this one, post it or send me a message.

It would helpful if everyone could register for a Kaggle account, grab the dataset, and have their favorite data analysis tool installed on the computer before showing up. (I recommend RStudio.)

UPDATE: we're going to hold this first Meetup at the Santa Barbara Hackerspace. This is shortly after the general meeting they hold every Saturday at noon. It's a small space, so I'll aim to hold this outside on the front deck.

Also, another attendee who's interested in Social Network Analysis brought this Kaggle challenge to my attention: https://www.kaggle.com/c/FacebookRecruiting. If any of you know any graph theory, bring your A-game since we'll likely talk about this challenge in addition to the Biological Response one linked to above.

Thanks!