More than 2,500 entrants from 76 countries have submitted to the Zillow® Prize contest, a competition aimed to improve the accuracy of its Zestimate®, Zillow recently announced. The milestone comes as the company releases a major update to the Zestimate, narrowing its accuracy to 4.3 percent nationwide while also transitioning all data to the cloud, providing the ability to arrive at a valuation in near real-time, and process three times as much data.
“We are excited by the global response we’ve gotten to date for Zillow Prize,” says Dr. Stan Humphries, chief analytics officer at Zillow Group. “The Zillow Prize competitors have responded with the same passion we see every day within our internal team of data scientists and machine learning engineers—we never rest in striving to make the algorithm more precise. The Zestimate is trying to answer an incredibly complex and important question, and with the strong contest submissions we’re already seeing, we are on pace to reach our goal of becoming one of the world’s most impactful machine learning competitions. In the meantime, we think homeowners will be pleased with the new enhancements we’ve made to ensure they have a trusted starting point when monitoring the value of what is often the largest purchase of their lifetime.”
“From the onset, we expected that Zillow Prize would be hugely popular,” says Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, host of the contest. “It’s a chance for our community to impact the Zestimate, an algorithm regarded by many as one of most high-profile examples of machine learning.
“Since the contest launch, we’ve been impressed by the response from Kaggle’s scientific community,” Goldbloom says. “As the qualifying round deadline nears and teams compete to earn their invitation into the final round, we expect the number of competing teams and daily contest entries to increase significantly—and Zillow Prize is on pace to become one of the most popular contests Kaggle has ever hosted.”
Zillow Prize participants have until Oct. 16, 2017 to register for the qualifying round, download and explore the competition data set, and submit their own Zestimate residual error model. The top 100 teams from the qualifying round will earn prize money and be invited to participate in the final round, with a chance to walk away with a $1 million grand prize.
For more information, please visit www.zillow.com.
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