Meet Agnes Mueni, winner of the Zimnat Insurance Prediction Challenge and aspiring data scientist

During a crisis like COVID-19, we recognize the crucial role that insurance can play in our ability to weather an unexpected storm. Insurance products help people and their families access the financial and medical support they need when they need the help the most.

Insurance companies rely on monthly premiums from their clients as their principal source of income; these premiums buy the client insurance against accidents, fires, injury or theft. However, insurance is a competitive market, and there are many factors that can cause a customer to leave an insurance provider, be it poor service delivery, competitive pricing, personal financial stress such, or other environmental factors. This customer loss is known in the business as ‘churn’.

In this hackathon your objective is to develop a predictive model that determines the likelihood for an insurance customer to churn - to seek an alternative insurer or simply drop out of the insurance market altogether. In light of the current pandemic, churn prediction can be used to offer targeted support and tailored services to certain customers vulnerable to churning. This means more people can continue to be covered when they most need it most and insurance companies can be more efficient at serving and retaining their customers.

About #ZindiWeekendz

The Zindi community is joining the fight against COVID-19! #ZindiWeekendz are virtual weekend hackathons hosted by Zindi. This series of #ZindiWeekendz throughout April and May 2020 focuses specifically on COVID-19.

In a time of lockdowns, remote work, and general uncertainty, #ZindiWeekendz offer data scientists the opportunity to continue to develop their skills while contributing to practical, open-source AI solutions to help in the battle against COVID-19.

Most of the winning solutions will be shared as a public good on GitHub. We are committed to supporting partners to implement these solutions and encourage anyone who is interested to reach out to us at zindi@zindi.africa.

About Zimnat (www.zimnat.co.zw)

Zimnat has been a leading player in the Zimbabwean life assurance and short-term insurance industries since 1946. For over 70 years, Zimnat has been protecting the assets of Zimbabweans, managing their wealth and ensuring that their assets and funds are passed onto future generations, should that be their wish.

About Microsoft (microsoft.com)

This hackathon is sponsored by Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft). Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Microsoft has operated in Africa for more than 25 years. In that time they have built strong partnerships across the continent, helped bridge gaps in infrastructure, connectivity and capability, and are working to empower countries in Africa to digitally transform while creating sustained societal impact. Earlier this year, Microsoft opened Africa’s first hyper-scale data centers in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. Most recently, the company also announced the opening of two Africa Development Centers in Nairobi and Lagos, where world-class African talent can create innovative solutions for local and global impact.

1st: $125

2nd: $100

3rd: $75

Top 10 will also receive access to valuable online data science learning content for approximately four months.

The evaluation metric for this challenge is Log Loss.

The values can be between 0 and 1, inclusive.

Leave your predictions as probabilities with values between 0 and 1 and do not round them to 0s or 1s.

Policy ID    Lapse
PID_3Q5P60V   0.34
PID_0WLGDPI   0.11
PID_WKYV46C   0.97

Competition closes on 24 May 2020.

Final submissions must be received by 11:59 PM GMT.

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

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.

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 30 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.

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 you are in the top 5 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 48 hours to respond and submit your code following the submission guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.

If your solution places 1st, 2nd, or 3rd on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification, and you thereby agree to assign all worldwide rights of copyright in and to such winning solution to Zindi.

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).

The winners will be paid via bank transfer, PayPal, or other international money transfer platform. International transfer fees will be deducted from the total prize amount, unless the prize money is under $500, in which case the international transfer fees will be covered by Zindi. In all cases, the winners are responsible for any other fees applied by their own bank or other institution for receiving the prize money. All taxes imposed on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners.

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.