Yahoo Gives Universities Huge User Data Stash

Yahoo has opened up its machine learning dataset to the academic research community, saying it wants to help 'level the playing field' between industrial and academic research.

The gift consists of thirteen terabytes of anonymized information linked to how users relate to and interact with Yahoo properties, including the Yahoo homepage, News, Sports, Finance, Movies and Real Estate. The enormous dataset is comprised of around 100 billion events and the interactions of around 20 million users between February 2015 and May 2015.

Yahoo's data provides categorized demographic information (age range, gender and generalized geographic data) for a subset of the anonymized users. On the item side, the title, summary and key-phrases of the news article in question are also included, while interaction data is timestamped with the user's local time and also contains partial information on the device used to access the news feeds.

Suju Rajan (pictured), Director of Research at Yahoo Labs, comments: 'Many academic researchers and data scientists don't have access to truly large-scale datasets because it is traditionally a privilege reserved for large companies. We are releasing this dataset for independent researchers because we value open and collaborative relationships with our academic colleagues, and are always looking to advance the state-of-the-art in machine learning and recommender systems'.

Web site: www.yahoo-inc.com .