Machine learning competitions are susceptible to intentional overfitting. Numerai proposes Numeraire (NMR), a new cryptographic token that can be used in a novel auction mechanism to make overfitting economically irrational. The auction mechanism leads to equilibrium bidding behavior that reveals rational data scientists’ confidence in their models’ ability to perform well on new data. The auction mechanism also yields natural arguments for the economic value of a Numeraire token.
NMR is the token used for staking in the Numerai data science tournament and Erasure marketplace.