DATA CHALLENGE: In an ideal world, school districts can see how their spending impacts student outcomes--and how that spending stacks up in comparisons to others. But every district reports expenditures differently, making it hard to set up a benchmark for comparisons. To this end, Education Resource Strategies (ERS), a MA nonprofit that helped over 20 U.S. school systems budget wisely, has teamed up with DrivenData to solicit your help.
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: create an algorithm that analyzes a set of district budget line items (provided by ERS) and predict the probability that each item will be tagged with the appropriate label (also provided by ERS). All the fine-grained details here. Prizes range from $500 to $5000; winning algorithms will be used by ERS under an non-exclusive license.
