Census Bureau offers $25k challenge

The Census Bureau announces a prize competition under Section 105 of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2011, Public Law 111-358 (2011) to create a statistical model to predict the 2010 Census mail return rate of small area geographic units based on their demographic characteristics.

The Census Bureau will use this model for planning purposes for the decennial census and for demographic sample surveys. The model-based estimates of predicted mail return will be publicly released in a later version of the Census Planning Database containing updated demographic data.

Participants are encouraged to develop and evaluate different statistical models and propose the best predictive model for geographic units. The intent is to improve our current predictive analytics. Internet address: <http://www.census.gov/research/challenge/>.