The Role of a Wine Pricing Competition in Teaching Data Mining at Stanford

Abstract

We will discuss how we coordinated, held, and judged a wine pricing competition (hosted on Kaggle-in-Class - inclass.kaggle.com) to engage students in applying prediction techniques learned in our data mining class at Stanford. We found that with proper incentives, the competition was very successful in getting students interested in working collaboratively in a race against the clock to eke out additional predictive performance in their models.