FICO and Kaggle team to offer world’s largest community of data scientists free access to Big Data analytics and decision management tools in order to solve complex problems

FICO (NYSE: FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, and Kaggle, the global leader in running predictive analytics competitions, announced that FICO will host Kaggle competitions in the FICO Analytic Cloud, a new web-based infrastructure for creating, customising and deploying powerful, analytics-driven applications and services.

FICO and Kaggle will begin running analytics competitions later this summer. These competitions will give data scientists, including Kaggle’s community of 180,000 members, an opportunity to solve analytic challenges facing organisations in life sciences, financial services, retail, insurance and other industries. Besides the chance to win cash prizes and professional recognition, all contestants will enjoy free access to the FICO Solution Stack, FICO’s groundbreaking platform for Big Data analytics and decision management.

“Crowdsourced innovation is an extremely exciting outgrowth of what we refer to as the democratisation of analytics,” said Doug Clare, vice president for cloud analytics at FICO. “Together with Kaggle, we’re eager to see what happens when some of the world’s greatest minds get their hands on some of the world’s most powerful analytic tools and applications in the FICO Analytic Cloud.”

“When you challenge a community of data scientists to solve data problems through an objectively judged competitive framework, you get solutions that are fresh, powerful and elegant,” said Karthik Sethuraman, Head of Analytic Solutions at Kaggle. “By partnering with FICO, we’ll be able to present our community members with an even wider array of real-world analytic problems from FICO’s diverse client base.”

Detailed information about forthcoming Kaggle competitions featuring the FICO Analytic Cloud will be released this summer.

The FICO Analytic Cloud is built on open-source technologies, and leverages the latest industry standards, including Apache Hadoop, an open-source software framework; PMML, an XML-based language for predictive modeling; R, an open source analytic programming language and environment; Apache Lucene, a search engine library; and Apache Tika, a content analysis toolkit.