Golden Helix has not historically participated in the various data mining contests offered from time to time on the internet.  However, as it became clear that many of our customers rely on the results of these competitions for comparing tools and methods, it became clear that not entering them was no longer an option.

These contests are held regularly, but they are not, unfortunately, held frequently.  Since it isn’t possible to turn back the hands of time to actually compete in yesterday’s competitions, and since it isn’t possible to suddenly list the results of several competitions that haven’t yet been held, we had to choose the middle ground:  we entered several contests that had already finished.

Admittedly, one could cheat on these contests by over-sampling, over-building, and otherwise “snooping” the data and associated results.  However, these contests were treated as though they were real, were “entered” only once, and should be considered valid comparisons – which is the reason they're here.

The following three examples are from the Data Mining Cup contest of 2003, 2006, and 2007, sponsored by Prudsys (www.data-mining-cup.com).

Learn how we (would have) fared:

• Spam prediction - 2nd place
• eAuction price maximization - 1st place
• Marketing campaign effectiveness - 1st Place