Tag: hackathon

Data Science team “Non-Juvenile Asymptotics” wins 3rd prize in annual Novartis Datathon

Patrick Altmeyer, Eduard Gimenez, Simon Neumeyer and Jakob Poerschmann ’21 competed against 57 teams from 14 countries.

Screenshot of team members on videoconference
Members of the “Non-Juvenile Asymptotics” Eduard Gimenez, Patrick Altmeyer, Simon Neumeyer and Jakob Poerschmann, all Barcelona GSE Data Science Class of 2021

The Novartis Datathon is a Data Science competition taking place annually, usually in Barcelona. In 2020, the Barcelona GSE team “Non-Juvenile Asymptotics” consisting of Eduard Gimenez, Patrick Altmeyer, Simon Neumeyer and Jakob Poerschmann won third place after a fierce competition against 57 teams from 14 countries all over the globe. While the competition is usually hosted in Barcelona, the Covid-friendly version was fully remote. Nevertheless, the increased diversity of teams clearly made up for the missed out atmosphere.

This year’s challenge: predict the impact of generic drug market entry

The challenge of interest concerned predicting the impact of generic drug market entry. The risk of losing ground against cheaper drug replicates once the patent protection runs out is evident for pharmaceutical companies. The solutions developed helped solving exactly this problem, making drug development much easier to plan and calculate.

While the problem could have been tackled in various different ways, the Barcelona GSE team focused on initially developing a solid modeling framework. This represented a risky extra effort in the beginning. In fact more than half of the competition period passed without any forecast submission by the Barcelona GSE team. However, the initial effort clearly paid off: as soon as the obstacle was overcome, the “Non-Juvenile Asymptotics” were able to benchmark multiple models at rocket speed.

Fierce competition until the very last minute

The competition was a head-to-head race until the last minute. Still in first place until minutes before the final deadline, the predictions of two teams from Hungary and Spain ended up taking the lead by razor sharp margins.

Congratulations to the winners!!!

Group photo of the team outside the entrance of Universitat Pompeu Fabra
The team at Ciutadella Campus (UPF)

Connect with the team

BGSE represented by “Just Peanuts” at Data Science Game finals in Paris

Class of 2017 Data Science graduates Roger Garriga, Javier Mas, Saurav Poudel, and Jonas Paul Westermann qualified for the final round of the Data Science Game in Paris this fall. Here is their account of the event.

Data Science Game is an annual competition organized by an association of volunteers from France. After competing in a tough online classificatory phase during the master we classified to the finals in Paris where we would be presented with a new problem to solve in a 2 days hackathon.

The hackathon was held in a palace property of Capgemini called Les Fontaines. It was an amazing building that made the experience even better.

The problem presented was to estimate the demand of 1.500 different products on 4 different countries using historic orders from 100.000 customers during the past 5 years by forecasting the three subsequent months. This was a well defined challenge that could be tackled with a large variety of solutions and for us specially the time constrain was one of the main challenges, since at the end we could be only 3 instead of 4.

We started by exploring the data and we realised that there were a lot of missing values due to a cross of databases done by the company who provided the data. So we spent some time by cleaning up the data and filling some of the missing values, to later on apply our models. After all the cleaning the key element to solve the challenge was later on to engineer good features that would represent well the data and then apply a simple model to predict the 3 months ahead.

The hackathon can be summed up in a day and a half coding, modeling and discussing without sleeping surrounded by 76 other participants from all across the world that were basically doing exactly the same, with short pauses to eat pizza, hamburgers and Indian food. So, a pretty good way to spend a weekend.

Hackathon: 24 hours to predict 7-day churn for SocialPoint’s Dragoncity game

Follow the 24-hour adventure of Data Science students and find out which Barcelona GSE personality was on-site at the Agbar tower to judge the results!

dragoncity

Over on the Barcelona GSE Data Science blog, you can read a post by Aimee Barciauskas about the Dragoncity hackathon that she and several other Data Science students participated in last week. Follow their 24-hour adventure and find out which Barcelona GSE personality was on-site at the Agbar tower to judge the results!