Lassonde PhD student, Nima Shahbazi, has won a second prize and $10,000 in a prestigious international competition by Kaggle.
Kaggle is a platform for predictive modelling and analytics competitions which companies and researchers use to post their data. Statisticians and data miners from all over the world compete to produce the best models using this data.
The goal of the competition was to design an algorithm to forecast sales for up to six weeks in advance at Rossmann, a large drugstore chain in Europe. Some 3,303 teams from around the world participated in the competition, including Shahbazi.
This is not the first time Shahbazi has been successful in Kaggle competitions. He had previously placed seventh and 32nd. Shahbazi is now ranked 61st out of 437,309 data scientists in the Kaggle community.
He is currently completing his doctorate in data mining in the Computer Science Department of Lassonde School of Engineering.