ISU team wins big in data mining competition

Jessica (Duncan) Hicks, a 1999 OHS graduate, and her team of Iowa State University graduate students, topped 98 other universities from 28 countries to capture first place in the 15th annual Data Mining Cup. The winner was announced July 2 in Berlin. It is the first time a team from the United States has won the competition.

Prudsys AG, a leading European data mining company, sponsors the intelligent-data analysis competition for universities. According to Prudsys, the competition is meant to be a “bridge between university and industry to identify the best up-and-coming data miners.”

Teams had six weeks to develop a solution for a data mining problem about optimal return prognosis. This year, teams had to use an unidentified online store’s historical purchase data to create a model for new orders that predicts the probability of a purchase being returned.

“The motivation for this contest data is that some online retailers offering free return shipping have almost half of their orders returned,” said Iowa State’s team leader and statistics Ph.D. candidate Cory Lanker.

“We could advance our ideas to create an application that helps online retailers reduce returned shipments and increase profit margins,” he said.

Between April 2 and May 14, teams worked at their respective universities to develop their probability predictions.

“Teams submitted return probabilities for approximately 50,000 purchases made in one month using data from approximately 481,000 orders from the previous 12 months,” Lanker said.

For the complete story, see this week's issue of The Ogden Reporter.