Ukrainian IT students place third at international competition in data analysis

The students, all enrolled in the Master’s Program in Data Science at the Ukrainian Catholic University, took third place in the finals of the International Queen’s Innovation Challenge, open to all students of bachelor and master’s programs. Seven top Canadian companies - Scotiabank, RBC, TD, BMO, Spirit of Math, Loblaws and Canadian Tire – delivered information about their company to the contestants and a request to help them solve a business problem through data analysis. Before, only Canadian students could take part, but this year the competition was open to everyone.  “We chose the task presented by BMO (Bank of Montreal), one of the four largest Canadian banks. The aim was to analyze funds deposited on user accounts and identify anomalies. These anomalies interested the bank as possible sources for investment products that they could offer their clients. In simple terms, we searched for signs that a customer had enough funds to invest in a profitable long-term project.”- says Anatoliy Stehniy, a member of the winning team. In addition, the bank wanted to establish optimal contact strategy for customers who might be potential investors. Therefore, the Lviv team developed several approaches to finding such anomalies and gathered them together in one algorithm. “Then, we created several models for selling an investment product on the basis of past data. At the last stage, we optimized the customer target group to whom the bank should offer a product as part of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). We simulated sales using Monte Carlo methods for different target groups, and selected the one that would most increase sales.” – added Anatoliy Stehniy. Other university teams taking part in the competition included students from Carnegie Mellon University, Smith School of Business MMA, Queen’s University, etc.