Yelp Dataset Challenge Round 11 Is On!

The eleventh round of the Yelp Dataset Challenge has opened. It will run until June 30, 2018. As in the past, the Yelp Dataset Challenge gives college students access to reviews and businesses from 11 metropolitan areas scattered over 4 different countries. This time around, there are a staggering 5.26 million reviews written by 1.3 million users about 175,000 businesses, as well as 146,350 check-ins and 1.1 million tips left by these users. Moreover, we have added photos about these businesses in a separate file, for convenience. With such a trove of data, the sky (or the processing power you have access to) is the limit. Remember, if you are a student, you’ll have the opportunity to win a $5,000 award if your submission is selected as the winner.

The most recent winners of our challenge, Ruirui Li, Chelsea J-T Ju, Jyunyu Jiang, and Wei Wang (from the Department of Computer Science of the University of California in Los Angeles) developed an elaborate recommendation system that matches businesses with potential customers by taking into account a number of aspects of the customer decision-making process. Their paper, titled “CORALS: Who are My Potential New Customers? Tapping into the Wisdom of Customers’ Decisions”, made good use of Yelp data.

Kaggle Weekly Kernel Award

Also, for the first time, the full review dataset (except photos) is available on Kaggle. Kaggle has an ongoing program called the Weekly Kernel Award, in which they award a different kernel author $500 for quality analyses. In the past they have set specific themes for this award that has been quite popular with the community and driven activity on those datasets. The Kernels Award now runs on the Yelp dataset, and Kaggle sponsors the weekly $500 prize. Even more reason to use the Yelp dataset!

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