Community Resource: Crowdsource your research

Anthony Goldbloom • May 18, 2010

Community Resource: Crowdsource your research

For three weeks Kaggle, a platform for data prediction competitions, has been running a bioinformatics competition (http://kaggle.com/hivprogression). The competition requires competitors to pick markers in HIV's genetic sequence that predict a change in viral load.

The results have been better than we could have hoped for. Within a week and a half, the best submission had already outdone the best methods in the literature. (This is particularly surprising when you consider that the prize is just $500 and the opportunity to co-author a paper with the competition host.) There's a short post about the results so far on the Kaggle blog (http://kaggle.com/blog/2010/05/13/are-competitions-the-future-of-research/).

This early result suggests that Kaggle has hit on a great way to do open science. A contributing factor in the success of the Predict HIV Progression competition is the degree of cooperation on the competition's forum. Moreover, by hosting this competition, William has opened up his dataset to other scientists, giving them access to a problem they wouldn't otherwise know about.

Kaggle doesn't control the results - their fate is up to the competition host. William is planning on open sourcing the winning method to the Predict HIV Progression competition.

We want to repeat this feat so we are looking for others to open up their problems. If you are interested, please get in touch (anthony.goldbloom at kaggle.com).

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