The eighth annual MLSP competition: Overview

This marks the eighth year the Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) Technical Committee has hosted a data analysis competition, which is held in conjunction with the annual MLSP workshop. For this year´s competition, which was sponsored by Amazon Corporation, entrants were asked to write an algorithm that attempts to automatically provision an employee´s access to company resources in an optimal manner. In this paper, we (the organizers of the competition) briefly describe the application, the data, the rules, and the outcomes of the competition. A total of 4 teams entered the contest. We provided real (declassified) training data to the entrants and tested the algorithms using disjoint test data. The two teams with the best performing entries describe the approach they used in two separate companion papers, both of which appear in this year´s conference proceedings.