Competitions have a long history in forecasting and prediction, and have been instrumental in forcing research attention on methods that work well in practice. In the forecasting community, the M competition and M3 competition have been particularly influential. The data mining community have the annual KDD cup which has generated attention on a wide range of prediction problems and associated methods. Recent KDD cups are hosted on kaggle. In my research group meeting today, we discussed our (limited) experiences in competing in some Kaggle competitions, and we reviewed the following two …