Data Fusion Contest is an online competition in which the contestants must solve problems related to data processing, forecasting, and generative technologies. This year, the competition involved three tasks: one on forecasting product categories, another on payment dynamics, and a third – on distributing account balance. While working on the tasks, the participants could attend online meetups with experts and analyze the proposed solutions.
Team RASCAR, which consists of students of the Artificial Intelligence Technologies Faculty Mikhail Shperling and Artem Guivan, as well as Anastasia Kovalenko from Kurgan and Artem Goncharov from Novosibirsk, presented one of the best solutions for the third task and took the competition’s second place. They developed an algorithm that can predict the balance of a given client’s savings accounts in two months. This solution will help understand which clients will have more savings and should be informed of the bank’s services. By participating in Data Fusion Contest, the students got the chance to work on a real business task based on synthetic depersonalised bank data.
“For the third task, we selected the best patterns, identified hyperparameters for the models, and combined three booster models that were trained on a logged target value before multiplying the forecast by 0.15 in order to smooth the distribution. The unique feature of our solution is its stability; the model is not susceptible to anomalies thanks to smooth distribution,” comments Mikhail Shperling, one of the team’s members and a student at ITMO’s Artificial Intelligence Technologies Faculty.
Team RASCAR also worked on the task involving identification of item categories based on their description. They developed a program that generates synthetic data with the help of language models. The team were in the lead for over a month, but ended up taking fifth place among 170 teams.
Data Fusion Contest is an annual international contest among specialists in the field of data analysis and machine learning where participants propose solutions for real business tasks. The contest is organized by the holding company T1 in collaboration with VTB Bank. This time, over 1,500 individuals from 153 cities and 25 countries participated in the event, delivering over 11,700 solutions to its tasks. The prize pool for the competition amounted to 3 million rubles.
