I think there will be a day when this will work. But right now my concerns would be:
1) The people looking for outside help probably don't have ANY model, so baselines are difficult. (I use synthetic baselines like just predicting the average of the predicted variable every time, and that's a very valuable tool, but I don't think you could get paid by beating them.)
2) When would you cut your losses on a failed project and move on? That would be incredibly difficult to do on a project that you had spent weeks or months on and not been paid. It's like cutting your losses on a failed trade in the stock market... it seems like it would be easy and obvious until you actually experience it yourself.
3) Once a company was in a position to take you up on their offer, they might as well post it on Kaggle and get a hundred people to work on it for peanuts. I'm really rooting for Kaggle b/c one of their long term goals is to let people like you (and me) make a living doing analytics work like you describe. But right now they just don't have the volume and all the projects pay out just a few thousand dollars (and only if you beat the other hundred participants).
4) If I was a company, and didn't have the expertise in house to build the model myself, I'd be wary I was really getting what I paid for. If I'm paying for a 10% boost in accuracy, how do I measure it rather than just taking your word for it?
1) The people looking for outside help probably don't have ANY model, so baselines are difficult. (I use synthetic baselines like just predicting the average of the predicted variable every time, and that's a very valuable tool, but I don't think you could get paid by beating them.)
2) When would you cut your losses on a failed project and move on? That would be incredibly difficult to do on a project that you had spent weeks or months on and not been paid. It's like cutting your losses on a failed trade in the stock market... it seems like it would be easy and obvious until you actually experience it yourself.
3) Once a company was in a position to take you up on their offer, they might as well post it on Kaggle and get a hundred people to work on it for peanuts. I'm really rooting for Kaggle b/c one of their long term goals is to let people like you (and me) make a living doing analytics work like you describe. But right now they just don't have the volume and all the projects pay out just a few thousand dollars (and only if you beat the other hundred participants).
4) If I was a company, and didn't have the expertise in house to build the model myself, I'd be wary I was really getting what I paid for. If I'm paying for a 10% boost in accuracy, how do I measure it rather than just taking your word for it?