

2009 UCSD Data Mining Contest  - TriinT
http://mill.ucsd.edu

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pj
I find it humorous that it is sponsored by FICO, the credit card industry
friend. College students are those most approached by credit cards. They are
also the least likely to understand how to use them appropriately.

FICO is really a system designed to train people how to live beyond their
means, through the incurrence of debt.

The best way to avoid the shackles of debt is to have a really bad FICO score.

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blogimus
I disagree. That is irresponsible advice. The best way to avoid the shackles
of debt is to be financially responsible. A good credit score is very
important for more than just a good interest rate on your credit card.

Your FICO score affects what you pay for insurance (or even if you _CAN_ get
insurance).

<http://www.iii.org/media/hottopics/insurance/creditscoring/>

Some debt can be worthwhile, especially when you balance your opportunity
costs. Renting versus owning: Save for 15-20 years (or more) before you buy a
house outright or save for 2-5 years and use credit for the rest? Need a small
business loan for growth? I'm pretty sure your personal credit will affect
that too.

And if you think you will ever need a security clearance, you better have a
good credit score.

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pj
Responsibility with your finances is the best bet, so I will qualify what I
said with, "For irresponsible people, it's best to have a bad FICO score and
not incur debt. Better to live a cash life." This often includes college
students.

Also, insurance is for poor people. Rich people don't have insurance. For
example, in Texas, you don't have to have car insurance if you can verify that
you have $100,000 in cash available to compensate a victim of your wreckless
driving. Debt is for poor people. Debt keeps people poor.

If you want to be rich, take on no debt, spend only cash, and earn more of it.

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aasarava
Actually, many rich people got rich by leveraging debt, not shunning it.

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atamyrat
Yay! And I was looking for interesting opportunities to try out data mining
tutorials recently discussed here in HN. <http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/>

Now we have ready to analyze dataset, ability to get immediate feedback on
performance of my model, and compare it with the rest of the world.

P.S. I'm new here.

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physcab
Thanks for joining. Stay a while and contribute as much as you can. I'm a
semi-newbie myself and I've learned a ton just by checking in everyday.

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dxjones
Can anyone decode this jargon: "The performance metric is the lift at 20%
review rate."

By the way, ... the contest is only open to students.

~~~
simonb
From their page
[[http://mill.ucsd.edu/index.php?page=Datasets&subpage=Tas...](http://mill.ucsd.edu/index.php?page=Datasets&subpage=Task1)]:

Scoring Predictions

Evaluation Metric: The evaluation metric for the E-commerce Transaction
Anomaly Classification (Easy) is lift at 20%. If S is the 20% of examples that
you think are most likely to have a positive label, then the lift at 20% is
proportional to the number of positive examples in S.

