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$10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

kaggle.com

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Re: $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

#11

Post by angusgr »

shasta wrote: post #10
angusgr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The Netflix Prize was $1M, and this doesn't seem like just 1% of the work. Not to mention Netflix only required an non-exclusive unrestricted license from the winning entry, rather than full reassignment of copyright (see tgflynn's comment.)

Except Netflix had a minimum standard of performance. This reads to me that the best entry submitted before time expires gets the prize, regardless.

Well Netflix also offered $50k each year for a "Progress Prize", but you're right.

I guess it is a question of "you get what you pay for", and I expect they'll get something quite usable but not great. Certainly good value for them, compared to contracting someone to do it.

Re: $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

#12

Post by ig1 »

ryan-allen wrote: post #2

Would you consider this kind of action as 'scraping the bottom of the barrel'? In the design community so-called 'competitions' are considered rorts and shunned by anyone worth their weight. What is ironic is that the NSW govt. probably have spent 50 times the figure working with private companies attempting to develop an acceptable solution, and this stinks of a last ditch effort.

Developers like solving challenges, look at how popular topcoder is. The money's not the important thing for a lot of people.

Re: $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

#13

Post by robryan »

rrrhys wrote: post #6

A tollbooth was taken off this road about 3-4 months ago that was a major congestion point - 2 years of historical data is largely useless I think.

As a little aside, being from Melbourne I was amazed how many toll roads their are driving around Sydney.

Re: $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

#14

Post by rrrhys »

robryan wrote: post #13
rrrhys wrote: post #6

A tollbooth was taken off this road about 3-4 months ago that was a major congestion point - 2 years of historical data is largely useless I think.

As a little aside, being from Melbourne I was amazed how many toll roads their are driving around Sydney.

Being from Sydney, I was amazed to see you guys have solved this particular problem on your motorways (time to destination based on traffic).

Is it good? I was just roadtripping through.

Re: $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

#15

Post by icefox »

Something more interesting is the company hosting the competition: http://kaggle.com/

"a platform for data prediction competitions that allows organizations to post their data and have it scrutinized by the world's best data scientists"

They have several up it looks like

Re: $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

#16

Post by gregable »

I've never looked at commute time data before, so I'm just an armchair analyst.

It seems to me though, as a driver, that commute times are dominated by accidents. And certainly while you could estimate the mean probability of an accident based on the number of travelers, the daily variance seems insanely high and its unlikely that any amount of training data is going to decrease that much. I wonder how good these results are going to be.

Re: $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

#17

Post by cubicle67 »

rrrhys wrote: post #14
robryan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a little aside, being from Melbourne I was amazed how many toll roads their are driving around Sydney.

Being from Sydney, I was amazed to see you guys have solved this particular problem on your motorways (time to destination based on traffic). Is it good? I was just roadtripping through.

being from Canberra, I think congestion is when the traffic is so busy I need to slow down from 80 to 70 :)

actually I'm in Perth at the moment and we have plenty of congestion here, but at least we don't have to pay to be a part of it

Re: $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

#18

Post by Andys »

gregable wrote: post #16

I've never looked at commute time data before, so I'm just an armchair analyst. It seems to me though, as a driver, that commute times are dominated by accidents. And certainly while you could estimate the mean probability of an accident based on the number of travelers, the daily variance seems insanely high and its unlikely that any amount of training data is going to decrease that much. I wonder how good these res…

Still, something could be done - for example, I know that the M4 heads west out of the city, and so is subject to poor visibility during afternoon peak due to sunset.

Re: $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

#19

Post by ecuzzillo »

ig1 wrote: post #12
ryan-allen wrote: post #2

Would you consider this kind of action as 'scraping the bottom of the barrel'? In the design community so-called 'competitions' are considered rorts and shunned by anyone worth their weight. What is ironic is that the NSW govt. probably have spent 50 times the figure working with private companies attempting to develop an acceptable solution, and this stinks of a last ditch effort.

Developers like solving challenges, look at how popular topcoder is. The money's not the important thing for a lot of people.

Yeah. Probably 90% of the people who end up doing this competition would end up enjoying it anyway if there was no prize; the prize just provides the activation energy to actually sign up.

Re: $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway

#20

Post by Carlfish »

robryan wrote: post #13
rrrhys wrote: post #6

A tollbooth was taken off this road about 3-4 months ago that was a major congestion point - 2 years of historical data is largely useless I think.

As a little aside, being from Melbourne I was amazed how many toll roads their are driving around Sydney.

NSW has been suffering for the last decade from a totally clueless government, and an opposition totally owned by its fringe right-wing. Labor couldn't govern their way out of a paper bag and the Libs figure that instead of drifting to the centre to meet the voters, all they need to do is wait until the voters give up and move to them.

NSW doesn't have any money, so they can't do any major roads project without farming it out to private investors and putting up a toll booth to pay for it.

This has led to some really bad policy decisions. For one thing, most of the new roads are bypasses that allow drivers to skip congested areas like the middle of the city. The toll then discourages people from using the bypass and the city remains clogged. Then to bail out the investors, the government closes lanes on the free alternative routes to force people to take the tollway.

There was an amusing couple of years where you could get away with not paying tolls just by driving through the electronic gate and ignoring the infraction warnings. Because the RTA was doing all the work of collecting the money but not getting to keep any of it, they didn't care enough to follow up people who didn't pay.

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