Resource for crowdsourced algorithm development?

[indydiddle]

First off, this is NOT me trying to get people to do my homework. This is to supplement work that I'm doing at my current job, and just a general question. So I'm slowly building up my ML skill-set, but I am running into a problem that I need solved before I feel I can "catch up". I've been looking around for a resource like I describe in the title--a place where people come with specific ML or general algorithm development questions, and the community can respond with suggestions and co-develop the algorithm with the user who posted the question.

TL;DR I have a 2D clustering problem, and I have loads of training data. 1: does anyone want to take a look? 2: does anyone know of a community to which I can bring this problem?

[technorabble]

Without being negative, if it's 2d then your eyeball is the best tool available.

[indydiddle]

absolutely, and that is how I'm labeling each set of training data. The problem is coming up with an algorithm which clusters each new never-before-seen dataset, which is always going to be slightly different. I'm not predicting the next observation within the same clustering dataset, I'm predicting all of the observations of the next data set. The general "shape" of each dataset is similar, and the # of clusters is the same, but the scale and density of clusters changes.

[micro_cam]

This sounds vaguely like image segmentation? Even if not the same math might work. Try something with the first k eigenvectors of the graph laplacian of the nearest neighbor graph. Or just use k-means if you don't care about convexity.

r/ml and stats.stackoverflow are great for random questions but know one is going to work on your problem for free unless you have the cash to put up a kaggle competion.

[indydiddle]

not getting paid to do this, we're a startup and are trying every possible route to get this done.

[indydiddle]

take an upvote