Performance Prediction Challenge

This project is dedicated to stimulate research and reveal the state-of-the art in “model selection” by organising a competition followed by a workshop. Model selection is a problem in statistics, machine learning, and data mining. Given training data consisting of input-output pairs, a model is built to predict the output from the input, usually by fitting adjustable parameters. Many predictive models have been proposed to perform such tasks, including linear models, neural networks, trees, and kernel methods. Finding methods to optimally select models, which will perform best on new test data, is the object of this project. The competition will help identify accurate methods of model assessment, which may include variants of the well-known cross-validation methods and novel techniques based on learning theoretic performance bounds. Such methods are of great practical importance in pilot studies, for which it is essential to know precisely how well desired specifications are met.