Call for ICDM Contest Proposals

Data mining as a field has grown not only through novel research developments but also through innovative deployments of existing techniques to emerging applications. Data mining contests held together with major data mining conferences such as ICDM, KDD, WSDM, etc., offer an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to compete for prizes and recognition through data-driven challenges.

We invite the ICDM community to contribute with interesting and challenging problems for the 2025 ICDM Contest. Participants will have around 3 months to propose solutions to the challenge and compete with each other until the end date of the contest. Winners will be recognized with awards and will have the opportunity to describe their solutions to the broader community as part of a special session of the conference.

Organizing a contest as part of ICDM is a great opportunity to showcase your organization and engage with an international research community focused on data mining and related disciplines. Contest organizers will be recognized on the ICDM website, will have the opportunity to present their organization and the proposed problem to the ICDM audience during a session of the conference, and will deliver the awards to the winners in the awards ceremony. We can also work together with organizations and the ICDM Sponsorship Chairs towards special packages that also include sponsorship for the main conference.

Proposed challenges will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

  1. Problem: Ideal challenges will be well-motivated based on real-world applications and should require the clever deployment of existing and new data mining techniques. As an example, a simple classification problem that can be solved using widely available tools (e.g., scikit-learn) is not the type of challenge expected. Instead, the problem should involve additional challenges including but not limited to scalability, distribution shifts, multi-modal datasets, etc.
  2. Challenge setup: Challenge proposers are expected to provide datasets, evaluation metrics, an online evaluation platform (with a private test set), and one or more baselines to be available on the contest website.
  3. Accessibility: The proposed problem should be accessible to participants with diverse backgrounds (undergraduate students, graduate students, researchers, etc.). Moreover, the problem should not require significant computing resources such as large GPUs.
  4. Recruiting plan: Contest organizers are expected to lead the recruiting process for participants across the world through various sources.

Key date

  • March 26th, 2025 – Contest proposal submission deadline
  • April 10th, 2025 – Decision notification
  • April 30th, 2025 – Competition starts
  • October 20th, 2025 – Winners are announced
  • November 12th, 2025 – Awards ceremony during ICDM 2025 in Washington, D.C.

    • Proposal format

      Contest proposals should include the following:

    1. Problem description and motivation: What makes your problem unique and relevant? We specifically ask for a detailed description of the problem, with its expected inputs and outputs.
    2. Evaluation: How can participants assess their progress towards developing an effective solution? Please try to include multiple metrics and examples of baselines that will be provided to the participants.
    3. Contest timeline: What is the plan for the successful implementation of the contest? Please see the key dates listed above.
    4. Awards: How will winners be recognized for their achievements? We recommend providing multiple awards for different participant categories.

      5. 5. Contest implementation details:

      • Competition infrastructure: Which competition platform will you use (e.g., Kaggle, new platform, etc.)?
      • Organizing team: Who will be responsible for implementing the contest, and what is their expected time commitment?
      • Dataset: What is the dataset that will be used in the competition? Is this a publicly available dataset? Do you have permission to use the dataset?
      • Experience: What is the team’s expertise and experience regarding the proposed problem?
      • Participants’ recruiting: How do you plan to promote the competition to a broad community?

      6. Organizers’ information:

      • Names, affiliations, email addresses, and short biographies of the organizers.

    There is no specific format or page limit for the contest proposal. We request proposals to be submitted to icdm2025contest@gmail.com.

    - The ICDM 2025 Contest Chairs (David Dai, Tongliang Liu, and Arlei Silva)