This is a private hackathon open to UCT student participants. If you are a UCT student and would like to participate, contact Derick Kazimoto.

Recently, there has been an increase in the number of building collapse in Lagos and major cities in Nigeria. Olusola Insurance Company offers a building insurance policy that protects buildings against damages that could be caused by a fire or vandalism, by a flood or storm.

You have been appointed as the Lead Data Analyst to build a predictive model to determine if a building will have an insurance claim during a certain period or not. You will have to predict the probability of having at least one claim over the insured period of the building.

The model will be based on the building characteristics. The target variable, Claim, is a:

• 1 if the building has at least a claim over the insured period.
• 0 if the building doesn’t have a claim over the insured period.

UCT Cryptocurrency and AI Society (linkedin.com/company/uct-cryptocurrency-and-ai-society):

The sole purpose of the society is to raise awareness and educate students on fourth industrial revolution technologies, such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and blockchain. We believe that these technologies are going to affect and shape the future of work and hence find it important for students to get involved and exposed to varsity.

Therefore, as a society we strive to help students from different technical backgrounds to get started with data science, machine learning and blockchain by running workshops, providing online resources, and hosting hackathons for students to hone their skills. Also, we invite guest speakers from the artificial intelligence and blockchain communities to give talks to society members on their latest works.

This is a private hackathon open to UCT student participants. If you are a UCT student and would like to participate, contact Derick Kazimoto.

Teams and collaboration

You may participate in competitions 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 total 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 immediately disqualified from the platform.

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).

The Zindi user who sets up a team is the default Team Leader. The Team Leader can invite other data scientists to their team. Invited data scientists can accept or reject invitations. Until a second data scientist accepts an invitation to join a team, the data scientist who initiated a team remains an individual on the leaderboard. No additional members may be added to teams within the final 5 days of the competition or the last hour of a hackathon, unless otherwise stated in the competition rules

A team can be disbanded if it has not yet made a submission. Once a submission is made individual members cannot leave the team.

All members in the team receive points associated with their ranking in the competition and there is no split or division of the points between team members.

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 100 submissions a 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 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 the other 80% 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, an UCT event host 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 Derick Kazimoto for verification.

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.

Zindi is committed to providing solutions of value to our clients and partners. To this end, we reserve the right to disqualify your submission on the grounds of usability or value. This includes but is not limited to the use of data leaks or any other practices that we deem to compromise the inherent value of your solution.

Zindi also reserves the right to disqualify you and/or your submissions from any competition if we believe that you violated the rules or violated the spirit of the competition or the platform in any other way. The disqualifications are irrespective of your position on the leaderboard and completely at the discretion of Zindi.

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 of submitted code
• 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
• A requirements file with all packages and versions used
• Your solution must include the original data provided by Zindi and validated external data (if allowed)
• All editing of data must be done in a notebook (i.e. not manually in Excel)
• Environment code to be run. (e.g. Google Colab or the specifications of your local machine)
• Expected run time for each notebook. This will be useful to the review team for time and resource allocation.

Data standards:

• Your submitted code must run on the original train, test, and other datasets provided.
• If external data is allowed, 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 with Zindi to be approved and then shared on the discussion forum. Zindi will also make note of the external data available on the data page.
• Packages:
• You must submit a requirements file with all packages and versions used.
• If a requirements file is not provided, solutions will be run on the most recent packages available.
• 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 (probation period). 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.
• Teams with individuals who are caught cheating will not be eligible to win prizes or points in the competition in which the cheating occurred, regardless of the individuals’ knowledge of or participation in the offence.
• Teams with individuals who have previously committed an offence will not be eligible for any prizes for any competitions during the 6-month probation period.

Qualifying Criteria

• All participants in the hackathon must be registered students (undergraduate or graduate) at the university they represent. Lecturers, University staff, and alumni may participate in a mentorship or advisory capacity.
• Teams cannot collaborate or share information with each other.
• Participants caught cheating or breaking any competition rules will be immediately disqualified from the competition.
• The winning code must be submitted to Derick Kazimoto for review and validation immediately at the close of the competition. In the interest of logistics, code review will take place only after the competition has closed and winners have been announced.

The evaluation metric for this competition is the Area Under the ROC curve (AUC).

Your sample submission should look like:

Customer Id  Claim
H0             1     
H10000         0
H10001         1

First Prize – R1000

Second Prize – R750

Third Prize – R500

Best Undergraduate Team Award – R750

09:00 - Official start of event.

09:00 – 09:40 – UCT Cryptocurrency and AI Society Annual General Meeting hosted via Microsoft Teams.

09:40 – 10:00 – An orientation to the Zindi platform and the challenge.

10:00 – 17:30 - Students form teams and work on the challenge.

17:30 - Submissions close.

17:40 – 18:00 - Announcement of winners and prizes via Microsoft Teams.

18:00 - Event ends.