22 February 2018 – Two Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) teams and one undergraduate Business Analytics team won the top three places in the inaugural China Fortune Land Development (CFLD)-NUS Business Analytics Innovation Challenge 2017, held on 2 December last year.
A total of 19 teams from NUS participated in the challenge, which spanned from 12 October to 2 December. Participants used data mining techniques and machine learning applications to come up with creative solutions to evaluate land prices in Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi, Mumbai or Manila. Eight teams were chosen to pitch their solutions for the finals.
Team Outliers, made up of MSBA students Rahul Dey, Raghav Garg, Sudharsan Ganesh Thyagaraj and Ashesh Sasidharan, won first place in the challenge.
According to team member Sudharsan, their team used unconventional sources like Twitter data, news based articles, to tie in with structured data and detailed market research. This gave the team’s solution an edge over the competition.
Team member Rahul said, “I am actually a programmer with a technical background. All the analytics techniques we used in our solution were entirely learnt from the MSBA programme. Without being in the MSBA programme, I would not have been able to approach this problem.”
Year 3 and 4 undergraduate Business Analytics students, Goh Jie Da, Chew Shao Quan, Michelle Goh and Lai Shumin, won the second prize. The team, named Team EzInvest, was the youngest group to participate in the challenge.
“We joined this challenge as we enjoy using data to find new insights and solving problems. We were able to use data analytics theories that we learnt in school and apply them to real world problems,” said Team EzInvest member Jie Da.
Team Fantastic Four, made up of MSBA students Debosmita Chaudhuri, Rahul Gupta, Mayank Khanna and Swetha Narayanan, won third place. According to team member Debosmita, the MSBA programme helped the team to think analytically and question their first instincts.
“I really gained a lot from the challenge as the questions asked by the judges were very relevant and insightful. Their questions gave us a different perspective and taught us how to ask the right questions,” Debosmita added.
