I've fired up R and am doing some exploratory data analysis. I think its an interesting problem and will definitely submit something if I can get decent predict

I've fired up R and am doing some exploratory data analysis. I think its an interesting problem and will definitely submit something if I can get decent predictions with the downloaded data. I've looked at the literature and research has tackled such problems using computer science(neural nets) and statistics (linear regression, Kalman filters). In my opinion, its easier to approach it as a statistics problem than a computer science one and this may explain why there is some hostility on HN. For instance, getting $10000 for a linear regression is easy money (although I would be surprised if the winning entry used this).