Data prediction competitions: What Archimedes and Roger Bannister can teach us about the business of data

‘Crowdsourcing big data’ might sound like a randomly generated selection of buzz words, but it turns out to represent a powerful leap forward in the accuracy of predictive analytics. As companies and researchers are fast discovering, data prediction competitions provide a unique opportunity for advancing the state of the art in fields as diverse as astronomy, health care, insurance pricing, sports ratings systems and tourism forecasting. This session will focus not simply on the mechanics of data prediction competitions, but on why they work so effectively. As it turns out, the ‘why’ boils down to a couple of simple propositions, one associated with Archimedes and the other with world record-breaking sprinter Roger Bannister. Those propositions are not unique to the world of data science, but, as this session will show, have a particularly compelling application to it.