Participating in a Challenge

This tutorial will teach you the steps for participating in a challenge.

Challenge Registration

If you do not have a Synapse account, see Getting Started to learn more about Synapse and how to become a certified Synapse user. You must be registered for the challenge to submit and participate. The registration button can be found on the home page or How to Participate page for every challenge. In order to be fully registered for any challenge, you must have a Synapse account. In addition, DREAM Challenges require that you:

(1) Become a certified user

(2) Agree to the DREAM Rules of participation

(3) Agree to the Terms of Use to work with the challenge data

Join or Create a Team

We encourage you to form a team with other participants for the challenge. You can either join a team or create your own team of collaborators. See instructions on how to form a team here. Note that you cannot be on more than one team per challenge. Once you have submitted as a team or individual, you will not be able to submit as another team. If you decide to be part of a team, please register your team to the challenge; there will be a place to do this in every challenge wiki.

Accessing Challenge Data

The data stored on the challenge Synapse site can be accessed using the Synapse website or programmatically using the Synapse R or Python clients.

Learn all about using Synapse by browsing through this documentation site. You can start here.

File descriptions are provided on the Data Description page in each challenge wiki.

Submit to the Challenge

You can submit to a challenge queue by using the R, Python, or via the web. All submissions must be first uploaded to Synapse.

For instructions on how to upload to a project, see Uploading and Organizing Data Into Projects, Files, and Folders and/or Setting Up a Project.

Most challenge queues will be labeled by challengename-subchallenge# as a challenge may have different questions that it may want you to answer.

Learn more about submitting to evaluation queues.

Share Ideas and Ask Questions

Every challenge has a discussion forum for participants. See the Discussion tab on the challenge project page. The forum is a space for participants to ask any questions and raise ideas.

Learn how to use the discussion forum here.