Data Prediction Competitions -- Far More than Just a Bit of Fun

Data prediction competitions facilitate a step change in the evolution of analytics outsourcing. They offer companies and researchers a cost effective way to harness the `cognitive surplus´ of data scientists who are hungry for real-world data and motivated to excel whatever the prize. Competitions are effective because there are any number of techniques that can be applied to any modeling problem but we can´t know in advance which will be most effective. By exposing the problem to a wide audience, competitions are an effective way to reach the frontier of what is possible from a given dataset.