Lassonde student places second in international Kaggle competition

Lassonde Ph.D. student, Nima Shahbazi, has won a second prize and $10,000 in a prestigious international competition by Kaggle.

Kaggle is a platform for predictive modelling and analytics competitions which companies and researchers use to post their data. Statisticians and data miners from all over the world compete to produce the best models using this data.

The goal of the competition was to design an algorithm to forecast sales for up to six weeks in advance at Rossmann, a large drugstore chain in Europe.

3,303 teams participated in the competition and Nima Shahbazi received second prize.

This is not the first time Nima has been successful in Kaggle competitions. He had previously placed 7th and 32nd. Nima is now ranked 61st out of 437,309 data scientists in the Kaggle community.

Nima is currently completing a Ph.D. at the Computer Science Department of Lassonde School of Engineering. His primary interest is in data mining.