SEATTLE, Oct. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Zillow
announces that the qualifying round of Zillow® Prize, the machine
learning competition with a $1
million grand prize, has closed following record-breaking
participation from scientific minds around the globe. More than
4,350 participants from 78 countries submitted over 76,000 contest
entries, averaging 517 a day, in an attempt to improve the
Zestimate® home valuation accuracy.
Zillow Prize is the second largest competition ever hosted on
Kaggle and to date, ranks as one of the top three most popular
machine learning contests ever, according to the data competition
platform.
"We've been blown away by the engagement of people from around
the world in the Zillow Prize," said Dr. Stan Humphries, Zillow Group chief analytics
officer. "That fact that so many individuals from around the world
are excited by this competition really speaks to both the
importance of understanding a home's value to consumers and the
intellectual challenge in getting it right. We've worked hard to
improve the Zestimate algorithm's accuracy rate to 4.3 percent
nationwide, and now we're eager to see the innovation within the
thousands of submissions shared by the global data science
community."
With the close of the qualifying round, all submissions will be
scored against the actual sales prices of homes sold over the next
three months. On January 17, 2018,
Zillow will announce the top 100 teams who have earned their spot
in the final round to compete for the $1-million-dollar grand prize.
In the final round, competitors must build an algorithm to
predict the actual sale price itself and will be allowed to use
outside data not provided by Zillow. To walk away with the
$1-million-dollar grand prize, the
winning algorithm must beat Zillow's benchmark accuracy on the
final round competition data seti and be more accurate
than any other competitor's algorithm.
Zillow publishes Zestimates on more than 100 million homes
across the country based on 7.5 million statistical and machine
learning models that examine hundreds of data points on each
individual home. To calculate the Zestimate home valuation, Zillow
uses data from county recorder and tax assessor records, and direct
feeds from hundreds of multiple listing services and brokerages,
and information entered by homeowners.
The Zestimate home valuation is a designed to serve as starting
point to understanding the value of a home and is not an appraisal.
Homeowners have the ability to update facts about their homes in
order to impact to their Zestimate. More than 70 million homes on
Zillow have been updated by the community of users.
Zillow
Zillow® is the leading real estate and rental marketplace
dedicated to empowering consumers with data, inspiration and
knowledge around the place they call home, and connecting them with
the best local professionals who can help. Zillow serves the full
lifecycle of owning and living in a home: buying, selling, renting,
financing, remodeling and more. In addition to Zillow.com®, Zillow
operates the most popular suite of mobile real estate apps, with
more than two dozen apps across all major platforms. Launched in
2006, Zillow is owned and operated by Zillow Group (NASDAQ:Z and
ZG) and headquartered in Seattle.
Zillow and Zillow.com are registered trademarks of Zillow,
Inc.
i Final round participants are challenged to beat the
Zillow benchmark model, a modified version of the Zestimate
algorithm that will be trained using the exact same data set
available to everyone in the final round. This benchmark model has
been created for the purposed of this competition and is different
than the standard Zestimate displayed on the website.
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SOURCE Zillow