This is a private hackathon open to Kenyan Participants. If you would like to participate contact Zindi Ambassador Rose Delilah Gesicho for the Secret Code.

The Tanzanian tourism sector plays a significant role in the Tanzanian economy, contributing about 17% to the country’s GDP and 25% of all foreign exchange revenues. The sector, which provides direct employment for more than 600,000 people and up to 2 million people indirectly, generated approximately $2.4 billion in 2018 according to government statistics. Tanzania received a record 1.1 million international visitor arrivals in 2014, mostly from Europe, the US and Africa.

Tanzania is the only country in the world which has allocated more than 25% of its total area for wildlife, national parks, and protected areas.There are 16 national parks in Tanzania, 28 game reserves, 44 game-controlled areas, two marine parks and one conservation area.

Tanzania’s tourist attractions include the Serengeti plains, which hosts the largest terrestrial mammal migration in the world; the Ngorongoro Crater, the world’s largest intact volcanic caldera and home to the highest density of big game in Africa; Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain; and the Mafia Island marine park; among many others. The scenery, topography, rich culture and very friendly people provide for excellent cultural tourism, beach holidays, honeymooning, game hunting, historical and archaeological ventures – and certainly the best wildlife photography safaris in the world.

The objective of this hackathon is to develop a machine learning model to predict what a tourist will spend when visiting Tanzania.The model can be used by different tour operators and the Tanzania Tourism Board to automatically help tourists across the world estimate their expenditure before visiting Tanzania.

About Nairobi Women In Machine Learning Data Science (meetup.com/Nairobi-Women-in-Machine-Learning-Data-Science)

This is a group for women interested in Machine Learning and Data Science. We meet to socialize, and to discuss machine learning and data science in an informal setting with the purpose of building a community around women in these fields.

About Alliance4ai (alliance4ai.org)

Africa's largest AI community. We are assembling Africa's sharpest innovators to tackle its most critical challenges, across basic human needs like food, health, finance and governance. It was incredibly important to come together as a continent in this decade to not only generate wealth through technology advantage but to slow down the unfolding bias and unfairness from Africa's exclusion from the AI revolution.

About Safaricom (safaricom.co.ke)

We are committed to keeping you connected. Safaricom is always there for you. #SafaricomForYou

This is a private hackathon open to Kenyan Participants. If you would like to participate contact Zindi Ambassador Rose Delilah Gesicho for the Secret Code..

Teams and collaboration

You may participate in this competition as an individual or in a team of up to four people. When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the competition, minus the highest number of submissions among team members at team formation. Prizes are transferred only to the individual players or to the team leader.

Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be disqualified.

Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).

Datasets and packages

The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.

You may use only the datasets provided for this competition. Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.

You may use pretrained models as long as they are openly available to everyone.

The data used in this competition is the sole property of Zindi and the competition host. You may not transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available any competition data to any party not participating in the Competition (this includes uploading the data to any public site such as Kaggle or GitHub). You may upload, store and work with the data on any cloud platform such as Google Colab, AWS or similar, as long as 1) the data remains private and 2) doing so does not contravene Zindi’s rules of use.

You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.

Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.

Submissions and winning

You may make a maximum of 200 submissions per day. Your highest-scoring solution on the private leaderboard at the end of the competition will be the one by which you are judged.

If your solution places 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in the final ranking, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification and you thereby agree to share your code on GitHub as a public good to the sector. We also encourage all participants to share their solutions on GitHub.

Ambassador Rose will reach out to the winners via the Zindi inbox. You will have 24 hours from the direct message to submit your code for review. Zindi reserves the right to disqualify any user, team if the code does not reproduce the winning submission.

Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 50% of the test dataset. While the competition is open, the Public Leaderboard will rank the submitted solutions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the competition, the Private Leaderboard, which covers the other 50% of the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition.

If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).

You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.

Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.

The evaluation metric for this competition is Mean Absolute Error.

For every row in the dataset, submission files should contain 2 columns: test_id and total_cost

Your submission file should look like this (numbers to show format only):

test_id         total_cost
tour_6322         65000
tour_1153         11000

If the error metric requires probabilities to be submitted, do not set thresholds (or round your probabilities) to improve your place on the leaderboard. In order to ensure that the client receives the best solution Zindi will need the raw probabilities. This will allow the clients to set thresholds to their own needs.

1st Place: $200 USD

2nd Place: $150 USD

3rd Place: $100 USD

Competition closes on 20 December 2020.

Final submissions must be received by 11:00 AM EAT.

The private leaderboard will be revealed at 11:10 AM EAT.

We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.