Over at dataists John Myles White and I have just announced a new prediction contest tailored to the statistical computing community: Build a Recommendation Engine for R Programmers.

The premise of the contest is as follows:

To win the contest, you need to predict the probability that a user U has a package P installed on their system for every pair, (U, P). We’ll assess your performance using ROC methods, which will be evaluated against a held out test data set. The winning team will receive 3 UseR! books of their choosing. In order to win the contest, you’ll have to provide your analysis code to us by creating a fork of our GitHub repository. You’ll also be required to provide a written description of your approach. We’re asking for so much openness from the winning team because we want this contest to serve as a stepping stone for the R community. We’re also hoping that enterprising data hackers will extend the lessons learned through this contest to other programming languages.

We are very excited about this contest, and hope you will consider participating. It is a great way to improve or test your machine learning skills, and we hope it will encourage collaboration among members of the statistical computing community.

For more info please read the full post, and good luck!