Congratulations, GEFCom2012 Contestants!

Thank Kaggle's data scientists, the Advisory Committee and the officers of GEFCom2012, and of course hundreds of contestants who made this competition a fantastic and exciting event! While we are still accepting reports from the contestants for final evaluation, I can't wait to share some summary statistics with you all. There are two tracks in GEFCom2012, hierarchical load forecasting and wind power forecasting. During the planning stage, we have received over 100 sign-ups across more than 30 countries in total. As of today... In the hierarchical load forecasting track: 651 unique users have downloaded the data; 107 teams with 160 participants and 1010 entries; 27 teams have got better scores than Tao's Vanilla Benchmark. In the wind power forecasting track: 583 unique users have downloaded the data; 134 teams with 198 participants and 1397 entries; 126 teams have got better scores than the benchmark based on the persistent forecast method. In the next a few months, the Award Committee will evaluate the competition reports, validate the results, and make recommendations of the finalists to present their methodologies in IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting 2013 in Vancouver, Canada, where we will announce the final award winners of GEFCom2012. Meanwhile, a few selected entries will be invited to submit papers to two prestigious journals (IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and International Journal of Forecasting). Stay tuned...