Zillow recently launched Zillow Prize, a $1 million award to the first person or team who can most improve the company’s Zestimate algorithm.
The competition, administered by Kaggle, is open to “data scientists, engineers and visionaries,” according to a release on the announcement, with a “public qualifying round” taking place now through Jan. 17, 2018, and a “private final round” taking place from Feb. 1, 2018, to Jan. 15, 2019. Contestants have until Oct. 16, 2017, to register for the qualifying round, download the competition data set and develop a model for improvement.
“We still spend enormous resources on improving the Zestimate, and are proud that with advancements in machine learning and cloud computing, we’ve brought the error rate down to 5 percent nationwide,” says Stan Humphries, creator of the Zestimate home valuation and chief analytics officer at Zillow Group. “While that error rate is incredibly low, we know the next round of innovation will come from imaginative solutions involving everything from deep learning to hyperlocal data sets—the type of work perfect for crowdsourcing within a competitive environment.”
The top 100 teams from the qualifying round will be invited to compete in the final round for the $1 million award, building an algorithm that predicts actual sale price that beats Zillow’s benchmark accuracy. Second and third place prizes, in the amounts of $100,000 and $50,000, respectively, will also be awarded in the final round.
Learn more about the Zillow Prize competition.
For more information, please visit www.zillow.com.
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