Primary competition visual

Traffic Jam: Predicting People's Movement into Nairobi

Helping Kenya
$12 000 USD
Challenge completed almost 7 years ago
Prediction
1467 joined
203 active
Starti
Sep 06, 18
Closei
Jan 13, 19
Reveali
Jan 14, 19
Uber and Mobiticket team up to predict demand for public transportation into Nairobi

Meet the Winners of the Uber Mobiticket Traffic Jam Challenge

Nairobi is one of the most heavily congested cities in Africa. Each day thousands of Kenyans make the trip into Nairobi from towns such as Kisii, Keroka, and beyond for work, business, or to visit friends and family. The journey can be long, and the final approach into the city can impact the length of the trip significantly depending on traffic. How do traffic patterns influence people’s decisions to come into the city by bus and which bus to take? Does knowing the traffic patterns in Nairobi help anticipate the demand for particular routes at particular times?

The aim of the competition is to create a predictive model using traffic data provided from Uber Movement and historic bus ticket sales data from Mobiticket to predict the number of tickets that will be sold for buses into Nairobi from cities in "up country" Kenya.

The data used to train the model will be historic hourly traffic patterns in Nairobi and historic ticket purchasing data for 14 bus routes into Nairobi from October 2017 to April 2018, and includes the place or origin, the scheduled time of departure, the channel used for the purchase, the type of vehicle, the capacity of the vehicle, and the assigned seat number. Zindi competitors will be allowed to create their own customized traffic datasets using the Uber Movement platform.

This resulting model can be used by Mobiticket and bus operators to anticipate customer demand for certain rides, to manage resources and vehicles more efficiently, to offer promotions and sell other services more effectively, such as micro-insurance, or even improve customer service by being able to send alerts and other useful information to customers.

The solutions to this challenge are the first step towards solving Nairobi's traffic problems. We look forward to taking this journey with you!

This competition is sponsored by Uber , Mobiticket, and insight2impact.

About Uber Movement (www.movement.uber.com)

Uber Movement is a website that helps urban planners, city officials, riders and the public better understand the transportation needs of their cities. Presently, Movement shows average travel times between zones in a city, derived from anonymous and aggregated on-trip data from Uber vehicles. Uber is planning the next set of functionality and datasets that will be added to Movement in the coming months. Uber Movement is available for 22 cities around the world.

About Mobiticket (www.mobiticket.co.ke)

Mobiticket is a start-up based out of Kenya that is working to digitize the transport sector across Africa through online/mobile bookings and cashless payments. Mobiticket is a service that connects customers to bus operators and enables them to book, reserve seats, pay, and get bus tickets all using their phones (MPESA or other mobile wallets).

About insight2impact (www.i2ifacility.org)

insight2impact (i2i) is a resource centre supporting the use of data for decision-making, with a focus on financial and economic inclusion. One of our flagship initiatives is DataHack4FI (http://datahack4fi.org/) – a pan-African innovation competition that focuses on the use of data (and tech) for good in the financial sector. Mobiticket was the overall winner of DataHack4FI Season 1. i2i is hosted by FinMark Trust and Cenfri and funded by the Gates Foundation in partnership with The Mastercard Foundation.

Rules

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 10 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.

As the challenge has now closed, the maximum number of submissions per day is 30.

Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 20% 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 100% of the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition.

If you are in the top 20 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.

Reproducibility

  • If your submitted code does not reproduce your score on the leaderboard, we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the score generated by the code you submitted.
  • If your code does not run you will be dropped from the top 10. Please make sure your code runs before submitting your solution.
  • Always set the seed. Rerunning your model should always place you at the same position on the leaderboard. When running your solution, if randomness shifts you down the leaderboard we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the closest score that your submission reproduces.
  • We expect full documentation. This includes:

- All data used

- Output data and where they are stored

- Explanation of features used

- Your solution must include the original data provided by Zindi and validated external data (no processed data)

- All editing of data must be done in a notebook (i.e. not manually in Excel)

Data standards:

  • Your submitted code must run on the original train, test, and other datasets provided.
  • If external data is allowed it must not exceed 1 GB. External data must be freely and publicly available, including pre-trained models with standard libraries. If external data is allowed, any data used should be shared on the discussion forum.
  • Packages:

- You must use the most recent versions of packages. Custom packages in your submission notebook will not be accepted.

- You may only use tools available to everyone i.e. no paid services or free trials that require a credit card.

Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:

  • First offence: No prizes or points for 6 months. If you are caught cheating all individuals involved in cheating will be disqualified from the challenge(s) you were caught in and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points for the next six months.
  • Second offence: Banned from the platform. If you are caught for a second time your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points using any other account.

Monitoring of submissions

  • We will review the top 20 solutions of every competition when the competition ends.
  • We reserve the right to request code from any user at any time during a challenge. You will have 24 hours to submit your code following the rules for code review (see above).
  • If you do not submit your code within 24 hours you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points for the next six months. If you fall under suspicion again and your code is requested and you fail to submit your code within 24 hours, your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points.

Further updates and rulings of note:

  • Multiple accounts per user, collaboration or membership across multiple teams are not allowed.
  • Code may not be shared privately. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform.
  • Solutions must use publicly-available, open-source packages only, and all packages must be the most updated versions.
  • Solutions 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.
  • You will be disqualified if you do not respond within the timeframe given in the request for code.

We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.

Evaluation

The Mean Absolute Error will be used to evaluate accuracy of the submitted solutions. So the lower the score the better!

Submitted files should be in CSV format and look like:

ride_id    number_of_ticket
1234           8
1345           10
Timeline

Competition closes on 13 January 2019.

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

Final validated winners will be announced by 28 January 2019.

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

Prizes

The top three best-scoring models on the Private Leaderboard will win cash prizes, as follows:

1st: $7 000 USD

2nd: $2 000 USD

3rd: $1 000 USD

Uber Movement Prize: $2 000 USD

The Uber Movement Prize will be awarded to the highest-ranking model that uses data extracted from the Uber Movement (movement.uber.com) platform in a "meaningful" way. (Show that you extracted and used the data from Uber Movement in a way that supports the story behind your predictive model.) This prize money will be awarded upon review of the winning code. It can be added on to the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd prize money indicated or may be a separate prize if none of the three top-scoring models used Uber Movement data.