DATA MINING CUP 2021: Students from the University of Geneva Take the Gold

prudsys AG today announced the winners of this year’s DATA MINING CUP (DMC). Students from the University of Geneva (first place), Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences (second place) and Aalto University (third place) ascended the winner’s podium. The participating teams at DMC 2021 developed a recommendation model for an online bookstore.

The winners of this year’s DATA MINING CUP (DMC) are the students from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. With their recommendation solution for an online bookstore, the four-member team beat out 115 teams from 28 countries that took part in the competition. One of two participating teams from Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences in Germany took second place. Third place went to the team from Aalto University in Finland. Fourth through tenth place went to students from the following educational institutions: Fulda University of Applied Sciences (fourth place), Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences and Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences as a mixed team (fifth place), Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences (sixth place), Anhalt University of Applied Sciences (seventh place), Wismar University of Applied Sciences (eighth place), ETH Zurich (ninth place) and the Technical University of Munich (tenth place).

Students had eleven weeks to submit a solution. The task was to develop a mathematical model for calculating relevant book recommendations. The participating teams created a recommendation model based on historical transactions and item characteristics. For any given book title, the model had to return the top five recommendations.

Since 2000, prudsys AG has been calling on students from all over the world to test their theoretical knowledge on a real-world data mining task. For the first time in the history of the DMC, the evaluation of the submitted solutions took place publicly via an evaluation page. On this website, visitors saw a fictitious online store with recommendations for a book calculated by the DMC participants. For fourteen days, visitors could vote on which book recommendations they felt best matched the displayed book title. The University of Geneva’s winning team’s recommendations received the most votes in the public poll.

The top ten teams presented their approach at the online awards ceremony. In addition to the DMC trophies, the three winning teams can look forward to prize money ranging from €500 to €2,000.

The video of the 2021 DMC award ceremony is available at this link:
https://youtu.be/UDtpqkh4Wmo