Kaggle currently has a "knowledge" competition going where you are given some basic demographic information about passengers and are asked to use this information to predict whether or not they survived the disaster.
Here's a link to the competition: http://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic-gettingStarted
This is a great learning problem because the data set is relatively simple, with some missing values thrown in, and just enough noise to make things interesting.
I'm just learning R and here's what I propose: If you're interested in honing your R skills (or are just learning predictive modeling) we try to tackle this problem together. In this thread we will post our R models--with plenty of comments explaining what each line of code does and why we chose to do it. In addition, we'll post our scores so everyone can see how successful our models are. To start things off, I'll post a comment with my best scoring randomForest model.
Since this is a learning thread, if you don't understand something about any code that's posted, just ask! R has a slight learning curve and everyone has to start somewhere.
[link][2 comments]