JK Lakshmipat University’s B.Tech student wins big at prestigious MachineHack’s hackathon

Jaipur: JK Lakshmipat University, Jaipur has added another feather to its cap. The leading institute’s final year computer science and engineering student Deep Contractor has bagged the 3rd rank in the esteemed MachineHack’s hackathon — Buyer’s Time Prediction Challenge. This fortnight-long hackathon saw participation from more than 700 data scientists and machine learning practitioners, who tirelessly worked towards building innovative solutions.

In the Challenge, the participants were to develop a machine learning model that can predict buyer’s/consumer’s time-spent on an eCommerce platform. Deep, who is currently working as a data science intern at a technological company in Jaipur, started with some basic exploratory data analysis (EDA), to study the data.

He used the ‘device_details’ column to make three new columns — medium_used; device_used; os_used, using feature engineering. After that, he used the ‘date’ column to engineer six new columns based on day, year, name of the week, is_weekend, quarter, and month. Once feature engineering done, Deep merged the test data set and training data set to perform label encoding on columns like device_used, os_used, week, and year.

However, before building the model, he dropped columns like session_id, device_details, client_agent, and date. While testing some popular ML algorithms like DecisionTreeRegressor and Random decision forests, he got the best score — 2.003 — with Decision Tree Regressor. He then tried Support Vector Regression (SVR) to reduce my score to 1.8 RMSLE on the leaderboard. Finally, he was able to further improve his score to 1.76 by fine-tuning some parameters in the SVR.

“I’m glad to be a part of JK Lakshmipat University which provided me the opportunity. My data science journey started a year ago when one of my college professors gave me a data wrangling task. This got me interested in data science,” said Deep, who always participates in hackathons to learn new skills and make new connections, especially with the experts of this domain.

JK Lakshmipat University (JKLU) is supported by the 125 years old legacy of the JK organization. At JKLU, they are passionate about building the country’s most innovative and higher education institute.

“JKLU adopts a multi-disciplinary approach to engineering that focuses on creating problem solvers. The curriculum is designed to keep pace with technological innovations, industry demand, and contemporary academic research. Experiential project-based methodology, designed with the support of Olin College of Engineering, Boston, USA helps us prepare the next-gen engineers,” said Dr. RL Raina, Vice-Chancellor, JK Lakshmipat University, Jaipur.