Epsilon Sponsors International Data Mining Competition
The Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Tools competition, the KDD Cup 99, kicks off July 15. Over 50 teams of from about 15 countries are expected to participate in this year's competition that challenges both data mining skill and software. Data mining expert Ismail Parsa of Epsilon, a leader in database marketing, created the competition in 1997. Epsilon is a sponsor of the event and host to its web page.
This data mining competition is the largest of its kind, and the only one that is oriented to the marketing industry. "Data Mining is largely driven by marketing applications, so we feel it is important to model the competition around a real life marketing problem," states Parsa, competition creator and judge. Parsa is senior director of quantitative analysis of Epsilon's analytic consulting group. He started the competition in 1997 when he was searching for a challenging one to participate in and could not find one with a great enough challenge.
"The KDD Cup is aimed at discovering the best of breed tools and technologies for a given problem. This helps close the gap between research and industry by providing the opportunity to work on real life problems. This stimulates further knowledge discovery and data mining research and development," states Parsa,. "Software vendors use it as a challenge for their products for a number of reasons. They like to prove the accuracy of their algorithms and the perfection of its tools and results. We provide a large data sets, so the competition shows the scalability of the products."
This year, the competition has two data sets and two contests. One is to further discover knowledge of last year's competition by requesting participants to represent the found information in a presentation format so that the findings can be explained. In the second competition, participants use tools of discovery such as to determine the likelihood that a computer user is a hacker.
Data mining is the process of finding patterns and relations in large databases. These patterns can be used in predicting consumer behavior.
Ismail Parsa is internationally recognized for his expertise in data mining. Parsa is a frequent speaker and is well published on topics of data mining. He is on the board of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. While at Epsilon, Parsa established the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Center, which provided packaged data mining services ranging from educational seminars to packaged Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.
Data sets and instructions for the KDD Cup are posted on Epsilon?s web site: http://www.epsilon.com/new/1datamining.html.
Epsilon is a national leader in providing information-based database and direct marketing services for high technology, financial, healthcare, retail, and nonprofit industries. For 30 years, Epsilon?s combined expertise in analytic and technological solutions has helped many Fortune 500 companies and some of the nation?s largest and most respected charities gain a competitive edge in direct marketing. Headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, Epsilon has offices in Dallas, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. More information on Epsilon can be found at its web site: http://www.epsilon.com.