Data mining competition with R

There is a new data mining competition aimed at predicting preferred data mining tools in R via dataists.com.   The concept of the competition is to try to determine which R packages are preferred in the R community via their CRAN package libraries.  The developers of this new competition are also in the R community with the NY R Users Group.

I am a user of R and I am also a member of the Dallas R Users Group.  As you can imagine I find this competition very interesting because I could benefit greatly from knowing the preferred methods of implementation in the R community.  This can also be a very interesting exercise to determine preferred modeling methods.  I believe this competition will give an insight into the most common methods to apply statistical computing in the community today.

R is getting a lot of press lately.  Revolution Analytics just released the first part of a series of articles on the impacts of R and why it is hot.  R as a statistical and optimization tool is really making a play in the business community.

I am a big fan of these data mining competitions as I've written previously.  It is really interesting what you can learn about the world from the competitions especially if you do not have previous knowledge of the subject matter.  I will try to bring up these competitions from time to time.  I would be interested to know if any IEOR Tools readers have participated in these competitions and what was their experience.