Stack Overflow Announced Machine Learning Contest on Kaggle

The World's most popular programming Q & A site Stack Overflow, had announced a Machine Learning Contest through Kaggle to find an algorithm that predicts whether (and for what reason) a question will be closed.

The competition titled "Predict Close Questions in Stack Overflow," will lasts up to 48 days. It will start from 4:10 AM, Tuesday, August 21, 2012 (UTC) and will end on 12:00 AM, Tuesday October 9, 2012 (UTC).

The Stack Overflow Team of Developers have prepared a dataset with all the questions on Stack Overflow, including everything they right before they were posted, and whether they finally ended up closed or not.

Contestants will then grab the data, build their brilliant classifier, run it against some leaderboard data and submit their results. Those who have submitted were encouraged to rinse and repeat until the contest ends.

The most promising classifiers will be grab by Stack Overflow and run them against fresh data to choose the winners.

Winners of the competition will be awarded with the following cash prizes aside from the respect they get from Stack Overflow:

1st prize – $11,000
2nd prize – $6,000
3rd prize – $2,000
Best Visualization of Data - $1,000

The secondary purpose of the competition is to improve the auto-flagging of questions, as the current system is very simple and has some known issues.

Aside from the competition announcement, Stack Overflow is also looking for a possible position as a Full Time Data Scientist.

For more information regarding the Stack Overflow Contest just head on to the official contest site Predict Close Questions on Stack Overflow via Kaggle.