The team applied statistical and machine learning techniques to assess the impact of delivery times on customer satisfaction for an online retailer.

Three PhD students (Sam Werner, Paul Pritz and Lewis Gudgeon) alongside a fourth team member from HEC Paris took home the $100,000 grand prize at the 2020 Data Open Championship on 6 April 2020. In winning they managed to clinch the top spot from among 7,102 applicants.

The championship event consisted of a 5 day ‘Datathon’, where the team applied statistical and machine learning techniques to assess the impact of delivery times on customer satisfaction for an online retailer in Brazil and to forecast customer satisfaction. They then had to pitch and defend their work to quantitative analysts at Citadel. There were 20 other teams competing in the finale.

The Data Open Championship was sponsored by Citadel LLC and Citadel Securities in partnership with Correlation One. There were 11 regional events prior to the finale, with the team previously winning the regional event in London out of 973 regional participants.

The Covid-19 outbreak meant that while the event is normally held at the New York Stock Exchange, this year’s event was held remotely.