Fifty-three teams of researchers have registered to the competition, of which twenty-five teams (with members from five continents) have submitted a model before the deadline. The submissions can be classified into three main categories. The first class includes models that can be described as variants of BEAST (14 submissions). This class provided the best predictions. Thirteen of the 14 submissions were ranked in places 1-13, with MSDs ranging between 0.0089 and 0.0114. The second class involves models that do not try to approximate the underlying processes, and use machine learning and/or similar statistical approaches (4 submissions). Models of this class provided the best fit of the estimation studies. Yet they failed in predicting the competition data, and were ranked in the last places, with MSDs of 0.0211 or higher. The third class can be classified as "others". It includes models that some of them could be described as generalizations of expected utility theory and prospect theory (6 submissions). The performance of these models on predicting the competition data was mild. The best predictors of this class models received MSD of 0.0124 and 0.0127, and were ranked 14-15th in the competition.

Models ranking

The models are ranked based on their MSD in the competition set (the column marked bold)

Rank	100*MSD Estimation	100*MSD Prediction	Description
1	0.5866	0.8893	variant of BEAST
2	0.7000	0.9308	variant of BEAST
3	0.7798	0.9325	variant of BEAST
4	0.6804	0.9516	variant of BEAST
5	1.0350	0.9658	variant of BEAST
6	0.7768	0.9688	variant of BEAST
7	0.6984	0.9781	variant of BEAST
-	0.7080	0.985	BEAST (baseline model)
8	0.7005	0.9965	variant of BEAST
9	0.6700	1.0336	variant of BEAST
10	0.9850	1.0535	variant of BEAST
11	0.6458	1.0631	variant of BEAST
12	1.1366	1.0750	variant of BEAST
13	0.9984	1.1438	variant of BEAST
14	0.7355	1.2376	other
15	0.6097	1.2690	other
16	1.8817	1.7043	Variant of BEAST
17	2.6557	1.7794	other
18	1.0598	1.8342	other
19	0.4081	1.8427	Statistical methods
20	0.9507	1.8433	other
21	0.4859	2.1158	Statistical methods
22	0.0019	2.6010	Statistical methods
23	0.8155	5.0146	Statistical methods
24	0.1996	NA	Statistical methods
25	3.6314	NA	other

 

Models Description and Code (with author's approval): 

• CPC2015 winner: Cohen, D., & Cohen, O. (2015).

Cohen's Beast Model