The Machine Learning Problem of The Next Decade

The simplest approach gave a baseline accuracy of 32%. By the next morning, one team already had a 53% accurate model. Extrapolating the first four days to our 60-day contest, you might expect the winning accuracy to get close to 100%. But in fact, this is what happened: The winning entry -- submitted by Chenglong Chen -- was just 6% more accurate than the best model submitted a week into the contest. As the Kaggle competition went on, more and more teams entered and existing teams refined and resubmitted their entries: Given that over 1,000 smart data scientists worked on this task, it's fair to say that 71% accuracy on this task is very close to the best possible accuracy with today's technology.