Note: This is a different type of competition on Zindi. You can use the Zindi leaderboard to validate your models. But to win a prize you need to submit directly to the USAID platform at https://competitions4dev.org/forecastingprize.

Greater access to contraceptives enables couples and individuals to determine whether, when, and how often to have children. Contraceptive access is vital to safe motherhood, healthy families, and prosperous communities.

In low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) around the world, health systems are often unable to accurately predict the quantity of contraceptives necessary for each health service delivery site, in part due to insufficient data, limited staff capacity, and inadequate systems.

When too few supplies are ordered, service delivery sites may run out, limiting access to contraceptives and family planning. When too much product is ordered, it leads to unused contraceptives that are wasted if they are left to expire.

Accurate forecasting of contraceptive consumption can save lives, money, and time by ensuring health service delivery sites have what they need when they need it and by reducing waste in the supply chain.

USAID works with local health care authorities and partners to support voluntary family planning and reproductive health programs in nearly 40 countries across the globe, which includes ensuring that contraceptives are available and accessible to people who need them.

With this competition, USAID seeks to identify and test more accurate methods of predicting future contraceptive use at health service delivery sites.

About USAID’s Intelligent Forecasting Challenge (https://competitions4dev.org/forecastingprize)

Zindi will not validate any solutions or pay any prizes. Rather we are hosting this competition as an easy way for the Zindi community to work on USAID’s challenge and get feedback on their models. We have split the dataset that is available by USAID into a training and test set for the purposes of setting up the leaderboard on Zindi.

This is the open call made by USAID where you can access the full dataset and also make your final submission: https://competitions4dev.org/forecastingprize

USAID will award up to $25,000 USD in prizes to innovators who develop an intelligent forecasting model—using the data USAID provides and methods such as artificial intelligence (AI)—to predict the consumption of contraceptives over three months. If implemented, the model should improve the availability of contraceptives and family planning supplies at health service delivery sites throughout a nationwide healthcare system. Second, USAID will award a Field Implementation Grant of approximately $100,000 to $200,000 USD to customize and test a high-performing intelligent forecasting model in Côte d’Ivoire.

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 or those allowed by USAID’s Intelligent Forecasting Challenge. 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 USAID. 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. In the case that Zindi agrees to form a team with you to make a submission together to USAID, 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.

As this competition has closed the maximum number of submissions per day has been increased to 30.

Your highest-scoring solution on the private leaderboard at the end of the competition will be the one by which you are judged.

Zindi will NOT maintain a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for this competition.

If you are in the top 10 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code if you are interested in teaming with Zindi for a submission to the USAID challenge.

If you submit your winning solution code to us for verification, this does NOT mean that you are assigning any 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 NOT be paid by Zindi. Your place on the Zindi leaderboard does not constitute any winning. To win prize money, you must make your submission to the USAID challenge platform.

There are no Zindi points 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 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

• 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.
• Packages:
• You must submit a requirements file with the versions of the packages used. 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 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.

If you make a submission to the USAID competition, please note that USAID will evaluate your submission by if intelligent forecasting models can:

• Outperform traditional methods.
• Understand the strengths and limitations of various forecasting approaches.
• Support stakeholders in Côte d’Ivoire to pilot intelligent forecasting methods for service delivery of contraceptives.
• Generate evidence to encourage supply chain decision-makers to use intelligent forecasting models in other countries if the models are successful.

The error metric for this leaderboard on Zindi is the Root Mean Squared Error.

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

ID is constructed by “year” X “month” X “site_code” X “ product_code”

Your submission file should look like this:

ID                                       prediction
2019 X 7 X C4001 X AS21126                   13
2019 X 7 X C4001 X AS27134                   59
2019 X 7 X C4001 X AS27132                   0

1st place: $20 000 USD

2nd place: $5 000 USD

Zindi will NOT award any prizes.

To win a prize, you must register and submit your solution to https://competitions4dev.org/forecastingprize

Some tips:

• Download the full dataset from the USAID site and retrain you model on the full dataset provided through the competition
• The USAID competition allows you to submit three different solutions
• You are responsible for carefully reviewing and following all of the rules and conditions stated on the USAID site

If you are a top finisher on the Zindi leaderboard, we encourage you to make your own submission to the site above.

We might reach out to the top 5-10 finishers on the leaderboard. If you prefer to make your submission as a team with Zindi, we will review and validate your code. If we are able to validate your solution, we might propose forming a Zindi team where we will build a solution based on the top solutions and make a submission as Zindi. If we team with you, we will split any prize money equally across all team(s) and Zindi.

Competition closes on 30 August 2020.

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

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

To be eligible for a prize, you must make your submission to USAID by 8 September 2020.