MachineHack recently concluded the How To Choose The Perfect Beer hackathon and announced prizes worth ₹50,000. Analytics India Magazine talked to the winners of the hackathon and found out their experience of participating and winning the hackathon.
Divyanshu Suri who stood first in the hackathon, is a Senior Manager of Analytics at XL Catlin. He has a Master’s Degree in Applied Statistics and Informatics from IIT Bombay and a Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics from Delhi University. He is an experienced business analytics professional with more than nine years of advanced analytics and statistical modelling experience in P&C Insurance. He holds expertise in claims, pricing & underwriting analytics, mainly in the areas of rate plan design, new business acquisition, retention, price elasticity, risk segmentation, rate plan monitoring and claims severity. He has published 5 papers in the field of Biostatistics and Insurance. Divyanshu says, “The beer hackathon at MachineHack was perfect, because it required execution of machine learning skills along with data understanding.”
Gourab Das who won the second prize in the competition, is a Project Scholar at the University of Calcutta. His journey towards Data Science started under the guidance of Prof SK Setua. Though it enhanced his theoretical knowledge, he felt he lacked practical experience. So he started analysing various industrial datasets across multiple domains. He feels that the field of data science has a lot of challenges and also introduces the concept of gamification in forms of puzzle solving via feature engineering. Gourab got acquainted with the Analytics India Magazine and soon became his favourite media outlet for anything related to AI. Gourab says, “Here I got information regarding their hackathons in MachineHack.com. I took part both of their competitions of Predicting House Price and How to choose the Perfect Beer. Datasets in the second competition contain a little bit of tweak in forms of duplicate data, detecting it improved my score from 0.4240 to 0.4258. It’s a great honour to be featured in Analytics India Magazine. I am really grateful to their team for hosting these hackathons and continuously dealing with our queries.”
Mayank Bhardwaj who came in 3rd in the competition is a Principal Machine Learning Engineer in the Strategic Analytics team at XL Catlin. His data science journey began almost a decade ago. While Mayank was always intrigued by numbers, problem-solving and coding, it was during his job after his engineering, he got an opportunity to work with statistical models for a leading bank. It was during that time he thought of upskilling himself to learn more about Statistics and he was a merit holder in his PGD in statistics. In his current position, he plays a critical role in developing and implementing machine learning models to improve efficiency and decision-making for businesses. Outside of his office work, he participates in analytics competitions regularly. Mayank said, “I enjoyed the competition and since the data was clean and forums were very active I could easily sail through it and looking forward to participating in other competitions”.
