Placement & Prizes
1st: DaBrain – Guangsha Shi, Sean Ma, Sheng Yang
$200 Amazon Gift Card + MDST T-shirts
2nd: The Data Miners – Alexander Zaitzeff, Ryan Sandberg
$100 Amazon Gift Card + MDST T-shirts
3rd: Arya Farahi
MDST T-shirt
Strategy Discussion
Congratulations are in order to DaBrain, who in the last week of the competition rocketed through the leaderboard, displacing the incumbent finalists and finishing out the competition in first place! DaBrain employed the only neural network algorithm in the competition, leveraging the power of the LSTM architecture for Recurrent Neural Networks against this document-based dataset. LSTM-RNN’s have seen great experimental results on NLP tasks in recent years, making this choice in algorithm particularly exciting for the Rate My Professor Challenge.
Our second place finalists, The Data Miners, lead the leaderboard for many weeks after the beginning of the challenge. The Data Miners managed an impressive number of submissions, more than double that of the next most frequently submitting team. In the end, an ensembling method combining ridge regression, random forest regression, and gradient boosting- as well as some hacky tricks beyond explanation- allowed The Data Miners to seize second place!
Our third place finisher was Arya Farahi, a PhD student of Physics. His final approach was well reasoned, relying on a small family of simple, easily interpreted predictors. Employing Ridge, Lasso, and logistic regressions, as well as a measure of ‘happiness’ described by an academic paper (Dodds, et al 2015), Arya was able to build out a highly transparent, robust model with very little additional tinkering.
Final Words
The MDST administration would like to thank everyone who participated. We deeply appreciate all the time and energy our members put into these competitions. We’ve learned a lot from our first internal competition and we hope you all did as well!
As always, send us your questions, comments, concerns, and suggestions to mdst-exec@umich.edu.
