U.S. Census Contest Offers $25,000 in Prizes

We burned a few brain cells trying to understand this news release from the U.S. Census Bureau. If you can figure out what you're actually supposed to do to win this contest, you might want to enter.

If a Dunedin resident wins this, please let us know, we'd love to interview them for a story! 

The U.S. Census News Release is below. By the way, the first place prize is $14,000, second place is $7,500 and third place is $2,500.  

U.S. Census Return Rate Challenge: $25,000 in prize money for predicting 2010 Census block group level mail return rates 

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/.