2019 Kaggle Involvement Program Winners

Congratulations to SOA members who placed in the top 10 percent of competitors worldwide

July 2020

Photo: iStock.com/laflor

The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is pleased to recognize the winners of the 2019 Kaggle Involvement Program. SOA members participated in data science competitions that challenged them to use cutting-edge technology to build models and find solutions with important implications, such as making predictions at a molecular level to predict interactions between atoms. In another competition, March Madness came alive as Kagglers anticipated the upsets, called the probabilities and put their bracketology skills to the test.

In 2019, three SOA members placed in the top 10 percent of their challenges, with one finishing in first place! Kaggle competitions are filled with thousands of participants from around the world, and the continued success of SOA members in the Kaggle program is proof that actuaries are truly the data science experts industries seek. Congratulations to all participants in this year’s program.

Google Cloud & NCAA ML Competition 2019—Women’s
Competition Summary: As a result of the continued collaboration between Google Cloud and the NCAA, last year’s competition was the sixth annual Kaggle-backed March Madness contest. Participants anticipated the upsets, called the probabilities and put their bracketology skills to the leaderboard test.

Member/Candidate	Final Placement	Percentile Rank (500 teams worldwide)
Joseph Cook-Shugart, FSA	1	0.200%
Eric Joseph Sitzman, FSA	34	6.800%

Predicting Molecular Properties
Competition Summary: Think your data science smarts would have made big predictions at a molecular level? The goal of this challenge was to predict interactions between atoms.

Member/Candidate	Final Placement	Percentile Rank (2,749 teams worldwide)
Andrew Paul Atkinson, ASA	123	4.474%