The Fragile Families Challenge is now complete. You can still view an archived version of our website.

Research from this project

• Salganik, M.J., Lundberg, I., Kindel, A.T., Ahearn, C.E., Al-Ghoneim K., Almaatouq, A., Altschul, D.M, Brand, J.E., Carnegie N.B., Compton, R.J., Datta, D., Davidson, T., Filippova, A., Gilroy, C., Goode, B.J., Jahani, E., Kashyap, R., Kirchner, A., McKay, S., Morgan, A.C., Pentland, A., Polimis, K., Raes, L., Rigobon, D.E., Roberts, C.V., Stanescu, D.M., Suhara, Y., Usmani, A., Wang, E.H., Adem, M., Alhajri, A., AlShebli, B., Amin, R., Amos, R.B., Argyle, L.P., Baer-Bositis, L., Bu ̈chi, M. Chung, B.-R., Eggert, W., Faletto, G., Fan, Z., Freese, J., Gadgil, T., Gagn ́e, J., Gaokk, Y., Halpern-Manners, A., Hashim, S.P., Hausen, S., He G., Higuera, K., Hogan, B., Horwitz, I.M, Hummel, L.M., Jain, N., Jin, K., Jurgens, D., Kaminski, P., Karapetyan, A., Kim, E. H., Leizman, B., Liu, N., M ̈oser, M., Mack, A.E., Mahajan, M., Mandell, N., Marahrens, H., Mercado-Garcia, D., Mocz, V., Mueller-Gastell, K., Musse, A., Niu, Q., Nowak, W. Omidvar, H., Or, A., Ouyang, K., Pinto, K.M., Porter, E., Porter, K.E., Qian, C., Rauf, T., Sargsyan, A., Schaffner, T., Schnabel, L., Schonfeld, B., Sender, B. Tang, J.D., Tsurkov, E., van Loon, A., Varol, O., Wang, X., Wang, Z., Wang, J., Wang, F., Weissman, S., Whitaker, K., Wolters, M.K., Woo, W.L., Wu, J., Wu, C., Yang, K., Yin, J., Zhao, B., Zhu, C., Brooks-Gunn, J., Engelhardt, B.E., Hardt, M., Knox, D., Levy, K., Narayanan, A., Stewart, B.M., Watts, D.J., and McLanahan. S. 2020. Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. [replication code]
• See also: Garip, F. 2020. What failure to predict life outcomes can teach us. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
• See also: Salganik, M. J., Maffeo, L., and Rudin, C. (2020). Prediction, Machine Learning, and Individual Lives: An Interview with Matthew Salganik. Harvard Data Science Review.
• Special collection of Socius
• Salganik, M.J., Lundberg, I., Kindel, A.T., McLanahan, S. 2019. Introduction to the Special Collection on the Fragile Families Challenge. Socius.
• Ahearn, C.E., and Brand, J.E. 2019. Predicting Layoff among Fragile Families. Socius.
• Altschul, D.M. 2019. Leveraging Multiple Machine-Learning Techniques to Predict Major Life Outcomes from a Small Set of Psychological and Socioeconomic Variables: A Combined Bottom-up/Top-down Approach. Socius.
• Carnegie, N.B. and Wu, J. 2019. Variable Selection and Parameter Tuning for BART Modeling in the Fragile Families Challenge. Socius.
• Compton, R. 2019. A Data-Driven Approach to the Fragile Families Challenge: Prediction through Principal-Components Analysis and Random Forests. Socius.
• Davidson, T. 2019. Black-Box Models and Sociological Explanations: Predicting High School Grade Point Average Using Neural Networks. Socius.
• Filippova, A. Gilroy, C. Kashyap, R. Kirchner, A. Morgan, A.C. Polimis, K. Usmani, A. and Wang, T. 2019. Humans in the Loop: Incorporating Expert and Crowd-Sourced Knowledge for Predictions Using Survey Data. Socius.
• Goode, B.J., Datta, D. and Ramakrishnan, N. 2019. Imputing Data for the Fragile Families Challenge: Identifying Similar Survey Questions with Semiautomated Methods. Socius.
• McKay, S. 2019. When 4 ≈ 10,000: The Power of Social Science Knowledge in Predictive Performance. Socius.
• Raes, L. 2019. Predicting GPA at Age 15 in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Socius.
• Rigobon, D.E., Jahani, E., Suhara, Y., AlGhoneim, K., Alghunaim, A., Pentland, A., and Almaatouq, A. 2019. Winning Models for Grade Point Average, Grit, and Layoff in the Fragile Families Challenge. Socius.
• Roberts, C.V. 2019. Friend Request Pending: A Comparative Assessment of Engineering- and Social Science–Inspired Approaches to Analyzing Complex Birth Cohort Survey Data. Socius.
• Stanescu, D., Wang, E., and Yamauchi, S. 2019. Using LASSO to Assist Imputation and Predict Child Well-being. Socius.
• Kindel, A.T., Bansal, V., Catena, K.D., Hartshorne, T.H., Jaeger, K., Koffman, D., McLanahan, S., Phillips, M., Rouhani, S., Vinh, R. and Salganik, M.J. 2019. Improving Metadata Infrastructure for Complex Surveys: Insights from the Fragile Families Challenge. Socius.
• Fischer, J.C. 2019. Data-Specific Functions: A Comment on Kindel et al.. Socius.
• Liu, D.M. and Salganik, M.J. 2019. Successes and Struggles with Computational Reproducibility: Lessons from the Fragile Families Challenge. Socius.
• Lundberg, I., Narayanan, A., Levy, K., Salganik, M.J. 2019 .Privacy, Ethics, and Data Access: A Case Study of the Fragile Families Challenge. Socius.
• Lundberg, I., Brown-Weinstock, R., Clampet-Lundquist, S., Pachman, S., Nelson, T.J., Yang, V., Edin, K. and Salganik, M.J. 2024. The origins of unpredictability in life outcome prediction tasks. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
• See also: Small, M. 2024. The value of qualitative data in understanding failure in prediction. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Acknowledgments

The Fragile Families Challenge was physically housed in Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University. It was organized by Matthew Salganik, Ian Lundberg, Alex Kindel, and Sara McLanahan.

The project was overseen and guided by a Board of Advisors: Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Kathryn Edin, Barbara Engelhardt, Irwin Garfinkel, Moritz Hardt, Dean Knox, Nicholas Lemann, Karen Levy, Sara McLanahan, Arvind Narayanan, Timothy Nelson, Matthew Salganik, Brandon Stewart, and Duncan Watts.

We received valuable web development assistance from Luke Baker and Paul Yuen of Agathon Group and Eric Carmichael of CK Collab. We have received valuable research assistance from Cathy Chen and Boriana Pratt. We received wonderful feedback on an early version of this project at a workshop on "Solution-Oriented Social Science" organized by Duncan Watts and Victoria Stodden as part of the Social Science Research Council working group on Digital Social Science.

All participants in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study---now named the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study---have consented to have their data used for social research. These procedures, as well as procedures to make de-identified data available to researchers, have been reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Princeton University (#5767). The procedures for the Fragile Families Challenge have been reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Princeton University (#8061). In addition, we have also taken further steps to protect the participants in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. If you would like to know more, please send us an email.

Funding for this project was received from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Overdeck Education Research Innovation Fund, the National Science Foundation (1760052), and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2-CHD047879). Funding for FFCWS was provided by the NICHD (R01-HD36916, R01-HD39135, R01-HD40421) and a consortium of private foundations, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. For M.J.S., part of this work was done while he was the Infosys Member at the Institute for Advanced Study.