Data Mining and Predictive Analytics Contest Has a $3 Million Prize

In a post earlier this year entitled, “Data Mining Improved Company’s Revenue By 187%,” we described how the knowledge that led to a 187% improvement in revenue was hiding inside data that Assurant Solutions collected, but did not use.

In a post earlier this year entitled, “Data Mining Improved Company’s Revenue By 187%,” we described how the knowledge that led to a 187% improvement in revenue was hiding inside data that Assurant Solutions collected, but did not use. A California managed care provider also believes there is hidden knowledge inside data that they have, but aren’t using. The Heritage Provider Network hopes to discover knowledge in patient healthcare data that can prevent hospital stays and reduce healthcare expenses. To find that knowledge, they’re turning to the public for help and offering a $3 Million prize to the team who can come up with the best and most accurate solution. 

The Heritage Health Prize competition officially begins April 4, 2011. Teams will have access to three years of non-identifiable healthcare data for thousands of patients. The data will include outpatient visits, hospitalizations, medication claims and outpatient laboratory visits, including some test results. The goal of the contest is to use data mining and predictive analytics to develop the most accurate model for predicting which patients get hospitalized, so that healthcare providers can take proactive steps to prevent hospitalizations for high-risk patients. This will not only save money but will also improve patient quality-of-life. Heritage is hoping that contestants will bring unique perspectives and innovative approaches to analyzing the healthcare data in order to unlock the knowledge it contains about patient hospitalizations. The American Hospital Association estimates that more than 71 million people are admitted to the hospital each year, and that $30 Billion is spent on unnecessary admissions.

Netflix held a similar contest that challenged teams to devise a more accurate system for predicting which movies an individual customer would like best. In 2009, a global team of seven members consisting of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers was awarded the $1 Million contest prize and Netflix replaced its legacy recommendation system with the team’s new algorithm.

To learn how Predictive Analytics can help your company quickly and easily gain insight from data, join us this Friday, March 25th at 11am ET for our complimentary webcast “Predictive Analytics with Spotfire”.

Steve McDonnell
Spotfire Blogging Team