Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing in Machine Learning – Getting premium value out of data

Something quite spectacular happened during the week: Students have achieved an astounding level of score improvement on a highly complicated machine learning problem - in just three afternoons. They achieved scores that improved more than 70% over the initial solution that were built by a team of experienced domain specialists and senior data scientists (figure 1). Considering that roughly half of the students had no prior exposure to machine learning, and that the other half were mostly beginners, these improvements are impressive. In fact, this is not the first time we observed this kind of results: every time we ran a data challenge using RAMP (rapid analytics and model prototyping) platform, major improvements have been made over the initial solution. So, how does this happen?