Abstract: I share some stories and lessons learned in the rough-and-tumble of modern data science competitions at Kaggle and DREAM. It has been an interesting and captivating journey on sometimes perilous trails between statistics, bioinformatics, and data science. I’ll also provide tips on how to succeed in these venues and predictive modeling in general, including a newly culled list of dangers and villains to hunt down in tabular data.

Short Bio: Russell D. Wolfinger, Ph.D. is Director of Scientific Discovery and Genomics at SAS Institute, where he has worked since 1989. Before leading SAS scientific efforts, he authored the MIXED, MULTTEST, KDE, and NLMIXED procedures in SAS/STAT.