DREAM Challenges (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods) is a non-profit initiative for advancing biomedical and systems biology research via crowd-sourced competitions.
[3] DREAM Challenges were founded in 2006 by Gustavo Stolovizky from IBM Research[4] and Andrea Califano from Columbia University.
[3] The data involved in an individual challenge reflects the disease context; while cancers typically involve data such as mutations in the human genome, gene expression and gene networks in transcriptomics, and large scale proteomics, newer challenges have shifted towards single cell sequencing technologies as well as emerging gut microbiome related research questions, thus reflecting trends in the wider research community.
[6] Motivation for DREAM Challenges is that via crowd-sourcing data to a larger audience via competitions, better models and insight is gained than if the analysis was conducted by a single entity.
After the winners are announced, organizers start collaborating with the top performing participants to conduct post hoc analyses for a publication describing key findings from the competition.