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APU students win two out of three top spots at global Data Mining Cup 2022

  • Data Analytics students prove mettle in international arena once again
  • Success due to knowledge on data mining, teamwork, time management

APU students win two out of three top spots at global Data Mining Cup 2022

During the recently concluded Data Mining Cup 2022, an international student competition to find the best solution to a data mining problem, two teams representing the Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation (APU) emerged as the biggest winners from the annual competition that attracted 78 teams from 59 universities in 23 countries this year.

The budding technoids had not only reached the winner podium twice, bagging First and Third Place awards, but also received total cash prizes of €2,500.

Mentored by the School of Computing lecturer Mafas Raheem, Team 1 made up of Data Analytics bachelor's degree students – Ngo Zhuo Xiu, Khoo Xin-Yi and Pang Hong Shen won First Place by developing the best solution model for cyclically demanded products in an online store, beating 77 participating student teams from 23 countries.

Third Place was won by Md Nowshad Ul Alam, a Data Analytics major from Bangladesh who  solved the same data analysis problem. He received a cash prize of €500, a trophy and a certificate.

The rest of the top 10 winning teams are from the University of Applied Sciences Zwickau, Germany; Universidade Federal de Alfenas, Brazil; The Army Institute of Management Kolkata, India; the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Perm National Research Polytechnic University, Russia; University of Mannheim, Germany; and Grand View University, the USA.

A slide from the winning APU team at the recently held Data Mining Cup 2022.

Organised by “prudsys AG” – a leading provider of agile AI technologies for omnichannel retail based in Germany, the annual Data Mining Cup (DMC) competition aims to enthuse universities’ students in intelligent data analysis (data mining) and to challenge them to find the best solution while competing with others.

This year, the virtual competition started on April 12 with the submission deadline on June 28. Each educational institution was eligible to send two teams to the competition. Students had a total of 11 weeks to submit a solution model. The award ceremony eventually took place virtually on July 14.

The focus of the competition was on “Replenishment”. At first, the contestants needed to determine which products were purchased cyclically by customers for a fixed product range in an online store. Next, the participating teams developed a model that predicts these cycles for all relevant products with customers or consumer groups.

Ngo Zhuo Xiu, the team leader of First Place winner attribute their success to a combination of three factors. “Our success factors are due to, knowledge on data mining, teamwork, and time management.”

He added that the team had applied data exploration, data pre-processing, data modelling as well as model tuning skills and knowledge they learned from their programme modules such as Data Mining and Predictive Modelling (DMPM), and Optimisation and Deep Learning (ODL).

“We believe that these skills are only applicable to the competition but also in our future careers in the Data Science and Data Analytics fields.”

Md Nowshad said, “Besides hardcore skills, modules that are designed for BSc (Hons) in Computer Science with a specialization in Data Analytics, also trained students’ critical thinking, and understanding of business values and market trends.”

The students’ supervisor, Mafas, said the winning performance of the two APU teams proved that the students could meet global challenges while validating the industry-focused curriculum students go through with able teachers.

“Any business problem will require a data science-based solution, guided by steps such as Problem Understanding, Data Understanding, Pre-processing, Model building, Model Tuning & Evaluation, which explains why the demand for data analysts and scientists has been increasing exponentially,” Mafas adds.

 

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