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WiDS News | December 12, 2019

Announcing the 3rd Annual WiDS Datathon

In advance of the March 2, 2020 Global WiDS Conference, we invite you to build a team, hone your data science skills, and join us in a predictive analytics challenge focused on social impact. The WiDS Datathon 2020 focuses on patient health through data from MIT’s GOSSIS (Global Open Source Severity of Illness Score) initiative.

Brought to you by the Global WiDS team, the West Big Data Innovation Hub, and the WiDS Datathon Committee, this year’s datathon will begin in January 2020 and last until February 24, 2020. Winners will be announced at the WiDS Conference at Stanford University and via livestream. Sign up now to participate, and we will send you the link when the competition begins!

This year’s dataset and challenge
The WiDS Datathon 2020 challenge will be to create a model that predicts patient survival. MIT’s GOSSIS community initiative, with privacy certification from the Harvard Privacy Lab, has provided a dataset of more than 130,000 hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU) visits from patients, spanning a one-year timeframe. This data is part of a growing global effort and consortium spanning Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and more than 200 hospitals in the United States.

Data analysis can be done using your preferred tools. The winners will be determined by the leaderboard on the Kaggle platform at the time the Datathon closes February 24.

We will host the WiDS Datathon on Kaggle, an online community of data scientists and machine learners. If you haven’t participated in Kaggle competitions before, check them out here — the platform has a ton of complex challenges with real-world impact and starter datasets for learning data science basics.

Getting started
To get started with the dataset and challenge we recommend you:

  • Join the WiDS Datathon mailing list to make sure you receive news and announcements when the datathon launches in January.
  • Create an account on Kaggle where you can explore different Kaggle competitions to get a sense of the platform before the datathon begins.
  • Consider forming a team with new collaborators! Connect with potential teammates on the Kaggle forums, at an in-person team formation or Datathon-focused event hosted by WiDS Ambassadors, and through social media with #WiDSDatathon.

Sign up now to participate, and we will notify you when the competition goes live in January.