The practice challenges have closed!

Enroll in the official UmojaHack 2022 Beginner Challenge here - Faulty Air Quality Sensor Challenge (BEGINNER)

Sign up for the event here: bit.ly/uha22-signup.

This is the official beginner practice challenge for UmojaHack Africa 2022.

Granular information on economic well-being is extremely useful for governments, policy makers, and NGOs. But household surveys that capture this kind of information are expensive and conducted infrequently in many African countries. For this competition we will attempt to create a workaround for this lack of data by building a model able to predict a measure of wealth as measured in household surveys using readily available inputs.

Using data from 18 different countries collected at different times, you must correctly predict the cluster-level estimated wealth measures found from surveys in 7 different countries not covered in the training data. A successful model could be useful for filling in the gaps between the more expensive surveys.

As this is a learning challenge, aside from the rules in the Terms of Use, no other particular rules apply. This challenge is open to all and not restricted to any country.

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.

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).

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

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.

If the challenge is a computer vision challenge, image metadata (Image size, aspect ratio, pixel count, etc) may not be used in your submission.

You may only use the data sets provided. External data is not allowed.

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.

Submissions and winning

You may make a maximum of 10 submissions per day.

Note that to count, your submission must first pass processing. If your submission fails during the processing step, it will not be counted and not receive a score; nor will it count against your daily submission limit. If you encounter problems with your submission file, your best course of action is to ask for advice on the Competition’s discussion forum.

Note that there is no public/private leaderboard split for this challenge.

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 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.

The evaluation metric for this competition is Root Mean Squared Error.

For every row in the dataset, submission files should contain 2 columns: ID and Target

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

ID           Target   
ID_AAcismbB  0.34   
ID_AAeBMsji  0.75    
ID_AAjFMjzy  0.19

This is a learning competition. Aside from knowledge, there are no prizes for this competition.

As this is a knowledge competition it will not close.

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