Tom Shafer Wins Blackmarker Machine Learning Modeling Contest

Data Scientist Tom Shafer has been declared the winner of its Blackmarker ML Modeling Contest.  Tom’s model outperformed all other contest entries and was validated with a 250 document out-of-sample evaluation set which produced an F-measure that exceeds the threshold for a doubling of the prize money.

According to Zach Buckner, CEO of Blackmarker, “Tom’s model leveraged innovative features that he developed over top of the original data, including some NLP-based features.  It also employed some clever tactics, such as altering the shape of the page targets that were provided by a commercial OCR package and by our proprietary Glyphic processing engine. This result is a testament to his exceptional talent as a data scientist.  We’re delighted with his work and with the results of the contest, which will be incorporated into our application to drive even greater accuracy.”