DATA MINING CUP 2021: Students from the University of Geneva Take the Gold

The winners of this year’s DATA MINING CUP (DMC) are the students from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. With their recommendation solution for an online bookstore, the four-member team beat out 115 teams from 28 countries that took part in the competition. One of two participating teams from Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences in Germany took second place. Third place went to the team from Aalto University in Finland. Fourth through tenth place went to students from the following educational institutions: Fulda University of Applied Sciences (fourth place), Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences and Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences as a mixed team (fifth place), Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences (sixth place), Anhalt University of Applied Sciences (seventh place), Wismar University of Applied Sciences (eighth place), ETH Zurich (ninth place) and the Technical University of Munich (tenth place). 

Students had eleven weeks to submit a solution. The task was to develop a mathematical model for calculating relevant book recommendations. The participating teams created a recommendation model based on historical transactions and item characteristics. For any given book title, the model had to return the top five recommendations.

Since 2000, prudsys AG has been calling on students from all over the world to test their theoretical knowledge on a real-world data mining task. For the first time in the history of the DMC, the evaluation of the submitted solutions took place publicly via an evaluation page. On this website, visitors saw a fictitious online store with recommendations for a book calculated by the DMC participants. For fourteen days, visitors could vote on which book recommendations they felt best matched the displayed book title. The University of Geneva’s winning team’s recommendations received the most votes in the public poll.  

The top ten teams presented their approach at the online awards ceremony. In addition to the DMC trophies, the three winning teams can look forward to prize money ranging from €500 to €2,000.

The video of the 2021 DMC award ceremony is available at this link.

prudsys AG

For more than 15 years, prudsys AG has been one of the leading providers of cloud-based AI solutions for retailers and, since 2017, part of the GK Software Group. prudsys deliver ready-to-use AI applications for Personalization, Realtime Prediction, Dynamic Price Optimization and Fraud Detection, which can be seamlessly integrated into existing infrastructures such as ERP (e.g. SAP) and CRM systems. Powerful, self-learning algorithms provide in-depth insights into product and customer behavior, enabling retailers to make fast, data-driven decisions for business success.

prudsys AG has hosted the DATA MINING CUP since 2000. Every year, over one hundred universities and thousands of students take part in the internationally renowned competition for intelligent data analytics and forecasting. prudsys AG has thus been successfully bridging the gap between theory and practice.