Data prediction site, Kaggle, has, er, borrowed FT Alphaville’s prize collection of World Cup notes.
But, being the light-hearted new media types that we are, we won’t hold that against them.
No, we will even promote the site’s World Cup 2010 contest — in which Kaggle lets you “go head-to-head with these corporate giants” in predicting the tournament winner. Here’s the summary:
As a break from projecting the strength of subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and other abstruse financial instruments, quantitative analysts at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS and Danske Bank have modeled the 2010 soccer FIFA World Cup. We have set up a forecasting competition, allowing competitors to go head-to-head with these corporate giants.
The challenge is to correctly predict how far each country will progress in the tournament. There is a small dataset and some links to variables of interest on the data page. There are links to the investment banks’ predictions and other World Cup modeling efforts on the hints page.
We are running two challenges side-by-side – a Take on the Quants Challenge and a Confidence Challenge. The Take on the Quants Challenge simply requires competitors to pick how far teams will progress in the tournament. Competitors’ entries will be ranked against the predictions made by the investment banks. The Confidence Challenge requires competitors to assign a level of confidence to each prediction – a competitor’s score is weighted by their level of confidence. Competitors enter both challenges with a single submission. There are more details on the submission instructions page and the evaluation page.
The competition closes on Friday, June 11 — the day the Cup starts.
The winner gets USD$100 to make a further bet on who will get the FIFA Golden Ball award.
Good luck.
