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Crowdsourcing biomedical research: leveraging communities as innovation engines

Key Points

  • Crowdsourcing is emerging as a novel framework to tackle scientific problems.

  • A variant of crowdsourcing, scientific competitions known as 'Challenges', enables a rigorous validation of methods, promotes reproducibility and fosters community building.

  • Challenges also accelerate scientific discovery by allowing large numbers of groups to work jointly on a problem.

  • Integrating predictions from different methods submitted by participants to solve a Challenge provides a robust solution that is often better than the best individual solution, a phenomenon known as the 'wisdom of crowds'.

  • The patterns of similar findings that emerge from several independent Challenges can provide useful insight into various key questions in genetics and genomics.

Abstract

The generation of large-scale biomedical data is creating unprecedented opportunities for basic and translational science. Typically, the data producers perform initial analyses, but it is very likely that the most informative methods may reside with other groups. Crowdsourcing the analysis of complex and massive data has emerged as a framework to find robust methodologies. When the crowdsourcing is done in the form of collaborative scientific competitions, known as Challenges, the validation of the methods is inherently addressed. Challenges also encourage open innovation, create collaborative communities to solve diverse and important biomedical problems, and foster the creation and dissemination of well-curated data repositories.

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Figure 1: Challenge platforms and organizations.
Figure 2: The steps and tasks in the organization of a Challenge.
Figure 3: The wisdom of crowds in theory and in practice.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank N. Aghaeepour, M. Bansal, P. Bertone, E. Bilal, P. Boutros, S. E. Brenner, J. Dopazo, D. Earl, F. Eduati, L. Heiser, S. Hill, P.-R. Loh, D. Marbach, J. Moult, M. Peters, S. Sieberts, J. Stuart, M. Weirauch and N. Zach for information on the crowdsourcing efforts they organized. The authors also thank the DREAM Challenges community, who taught them everything about Challenges that they have tried to share in this Review.

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Correspondence to Julio Saez-Rodriguez or Gustavo Stolovitzky.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary information S1 (box)

Scoring Metrics (PDF 241 kb)

Supplementary information S2 (table)

Examples of collaborative competitions. (PDF 252 kb)

PowerPoint slides

Glossary

Cloud computing

An internet-based infrastructure to perform computational tasks remotely.

Crowdsourcing

A methodology that uses the voluntary help of large communities to solve problems posed by an organization.

Challenges

(Also known as collaborative competitions). Calls to a wide community to submit proposed solutions to a specific problem. These solutions are evaluated by a panel of experts using diverse criteria, and the best performer or winner is selected.

Gamification

The abstraction of a problem in such a way that working towards its solution feels like playing a computer game.

Benchmarking Challenge

A Challenge used to determine the relative performance of the methodologies used to solve a particular problem in which a known solution is available to the organizers but not the participants. The organizers compare the proposed solutions to the solution that is only available to them (that is, the gold standard). It is expected that the good solutions will generalize to instances of the problem for which the solution is unknown.

Gold standard

In allusion to the abandoned system of assigning the true value of a currency, the gold standard in a Challenge is the true solution to the posed problem in one particular instance of that problem.

Leaderboards

Tables that provide real-time feedback of performance and scores of the proposed solutions to a Challenge, allowing participants to monitor their ranking.

Training set

In general, this is the portion of the data used to train (fit) a computational model. In a Challenge, this is the data given to the participants to build their models. It normally encompasses most of the data.

Cross-validation set

A procedure whereby a participant uses subsets of the training data to adjust model parameters based on how well they predict this data set.

Test set

The subset of data that is separate from the training set and the cross-validation set (that is, the data that participants never have access to in any sort of way). The test set is used to do a final assessment of the predictive power of the models.

Wisdom of crowds

The collective wisdom that emerges when the solutions to a problem that are proposed by a large pool of people are aggregated. The aggregate solution is often better than the best individual solution.

Hackathons

Events in which specialists in a topic, normally related to computation, get together to work on a specific problem.

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Saez-Rodriguez, J., Costello, J., Friend, S. et al. Crowdsourcing biomedical research: leveraging communities as innovation engines. Nat Rev Genet 17, 470–486 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg.2016.69

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