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Top Competitive Data

Medium-U

Science Platforms other

than Kaggle
Parul Pandey Apr 7, 2019 · 7 min read

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Photo by George Becker from Pexels

The best way of learning anything is by

doing.

What do you do after you have completed hundreds of

MOOCs, consumed thousands of books and notes, and
listened to a million people rant about their experience in
Data Science? You start applying the concepts. The only way
to apply machine learning concepts is by getting your hands
dirty. Either find some real-world problems in your area of
interest or participate in Hackathons and Machine learning

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Competitions.

Competitive Data Science is not all about applying algorithms.

An algorithm is essentially a tool, and anybody can use it by
writing just a few lines of code. The main takeaway from
participating in these competitions is that they provide a great
learning opportunity. Of course, real-life problems are not
necessarily the same as those provided in the competitions;
still, these platforms enable you to apply your knowledge to
processes and see how you fare compared to others.

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Advantages of participating in Data

Science Competitions
You have a lot to gain and practically nothing to lose by
participating in these competitions. It has both tangible and
intangible benefits like:

Great learning opportunity.

Getting exposed to state of the art approaches and

datasets.

Networking with like-minded people. Working in teams is

even great since it helps to think over a problem from
different perspectives.

Showcasing your talent to the world and a chance of

getting recruited

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It is also fun to participate and see how you fare on the

leaderboard.

The prize is a bonus but shouldn’t be the sole criteria.

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On September 18, 2009, BellKor Pragmatic Chaos officially won the NetFlix competition
by a tiebreaker.

Kaggle is a well-known platform for Data Science

competitions. It is an online community of more than
1,000,00 registered users consisting of both novice and
expert. However, apart from Kaggle, there are other Data
Mining Competition Platforms worth knowing and exploring.
Here is a brief overview of some of them.

Driven Data

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DrivenData hosts data science competitions to build a better

world, bringing cutting-edge predictive models to
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organizations tackling the world’s most challenging problems.
Driven data hosts data science competitions for social good
in international development, health, education, research and
conservation, and public services. You can either join a
competition or host one of your own.

The site has a section dedicated to Sample Projects, which

provides information about some of their successful projects
in the form of a case study. The datasets listed in Driven Data
are related to Non-Profits ranging from wildlife preservation
to public health. Thus, if you want to apply your skills to real-
world problems, this is the platform for you.

CrowdANALYTIX

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CrowdANALYTIX is a crowdsourced analytics platform that

converts business challenges and problems into competitions.
The CrowdANALYTIX Community collaborates & competes to
build & optimize AI, ML, NLP, and Deep Learning algorithms.
The platform also hosts a community blog that has excellent
resources, including interviews and reference materials.

Innocentive

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InnoCentive mainly focuses on problems dealing with life

sciences but has other exciting competitions too. Here, Solvers
contributes to tackling some of the world’s most pressing
problems, from facilitating access to clean water at a
household level to passive solar devices designed to attract &
kill malaria-carrying mosquitos. Challenges are real problems
requiring sustained concentration, critical thinking, research,
creativity, and knowledge synthesis. Developing a solution is
incredibly rewarding and an unparalleled mental workout.

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TunedIT

TunedIT started as a scientific doctoral project carried at the

University of Warsaw. The goal was to help data mining
scientists conduct repeatable experiments and quickly
evaluate data-driven algorithms. The Research part was

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supplemented later on with the TunedIT Challenges platform

for hosting data competitions — for educational, scientific,
and business purposes.

Codalab

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Codalab is an open-source web-based platform that enables

researchers, developers, and data scientists to collaborate to
advance research fields where machine learning and
advanced computation are used. CodaLab helps solve many
common problems in data-oriented research through its
online community, where people can share worksheets and
participate in competitions. You can either participate in an
existing competition or host a new competition.

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ZINDI

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Zindi is the first data science competition platform in Africa.

Zindi hosts an entire data science ecosystem of scientists,
engineers, academics, companies, NGOs, governments, and
institutions focused on solving Africa’s most pressing
problems.

Bitgrit

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https://bitgrit.net/competition
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Bitgrit is a newcomer to the data science competition space

that launched this year. The platform is spearheaded by
Japanese startup Bitgrit Inc. and has already accumulated a
community of over 25,000 data scientists globally.

Since its foundation, Bitgrit has hosted several AI

competitions, including one to predict foreign exchange
rates and another to optimize the algorithm for a profile-
matching mobile app. They also have a job board focused on
data science job opportunities with a wide variety of global
Analytics
clients. Vidhya

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Analytics Vidhya provides a community-based knowledge

portal for Analytics and Data Science professionals. In Medium-U

addition to providing great resources for Data Science

learnings, it hosts Hackathons, which are Real-life industry
problems being released in the form of contests. You can
CrowdAI
either participate in the challenges or sponsor a hackathon.
Most companies
Update 17th marchthat organize Hackathons on Analytics
2020:
Vidhya also offer job opportunities to the top scorers.
CrowdAI, which has since shut down (see
https://www.crowdai.org/blogs/7). Since then, one of their
founders has created this other site with a similar name, which
still hosts competitions: https://www.aicrowd.com/. Thanks to
Harald Carlens for providing this information.

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The data science challenge platform crowdAI hosts multiple
open data science challenges each year. The challenges cover
image classification problems, text recognition, reinforcement
learning, adversarial attacks, image segmentation, resource
Numerai
allocation optimization, and many other areas across multiple
domains. They were awarded over $100,000 from Amazon
and Nvidia for their 2017 challenge called “Learning to Run.”

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Tianchi
Numerai is an AI-run, crowd-sourced hedge fund built by a
network of data scientists. It holds a data science competition
every week that powers a real hedge fund. Numerai provides
encrypted data every we
submit their predictions
from all its submissions a

The data scientists subm

the potential to earn som
token on the Ethereum b

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Tianchi is a data competition platform by Alibaba Cloud and

resembles Kaggle in many ways. It is a community where
hundreds of thousands of data scientists cooperate and
connect with businesses and governments globally to solve
the hardest business problems across industries.

DataScienceChallenge

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These Data Science Challenges are sponsored by the Defence

Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and several
other UK government departments, including the
Government Office for Science, SIS, and MI5. The
challenges are designed to encourage the brightest minds in
data science to help solve real-world problems. The two

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challenges offered by the platform are over as of now, but

they will soon come out with new problems that will
challenge you to find unorthodox answers to real-world
problems.

Apart from this, there are some competitions which are only
held annually.

KDD Cup
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KDD Cup is the annual Data Mining and Knowledge

Discovery competition organized by ACM Special Interest
Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, the data
miners' leading professional organization.

VizDoom AI competition(VDAIC)

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ViZDoom is a Doom-based AI Research Platform for
Reinforcement Learning from Raw VisualInformation. The
Visual Doom AI competition participants are supposed to
submit a controller (C++, Python, or Java) that plays Doom.
Machine Learning Contests

Machine Learning Contests is a data science competition

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aggregator site. It lists ongoing machine learning

competitions/data science contests across Kaggle,
DrivenData, AICrowd, and others. It’s all open source and
community maintained.

Conclusion
Although this list will change over time, I believe you will find
the most relevant and interesting competition. If you think of
other data science competition platforms I haven’t mentioned,
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please put them in the comment section below.

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