A new breed of data science “tournaments” is taking front stage in finding fresh new talent to serve the hedge fund industry. An interesting article appearing in the New York Times describes the latest BattleFin competition, called the Big Data Combine, where 382 teams from 43 countries have been given a data set of stock market prices with some closing prices missing. Using this and a series of external “clues” — news that could affect stock price movements — the players build a predictive model.
BattleFin teamed up with Kaggle, a Web community of number crunchers hungry for data sets and up for a challenge, and RavenPack, a provider of sophisticated market data. It appears we’re witnessing the Wild West days of big data where data scientists are the modern day gunslingers. Exciting times indeed.
Read the Full Story.