On the plague trail: HackerEarth Machine Learning challenge

Overview

Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems with the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed.

Machine Learning is a science that determines patterns in data. These patterns provide deeper meaning to problems and help you to first understand problems better and then solve the same with elegance.

Here is the new HackerEarth’s monthly Machine Learning challenge- On the plague trail.  

This challenge is designed to help you improve your machine learning skills by competing and learning from fellow participants.

Prizes

• 1st Prize - 250 USD

• 2nd Prize - 150 USD

Problem statement

A group of senior scientists misplaced a package containing fatal plague bacteria during one of their trips. With no means of tracking where the package is, scientists are now trying to come up with a solution to stop the plague. This plague has 7 different strains that are unique for each continent. This strain is expanding rapidly in each continent.

The vaccine of this plague is available in a limited quantity. This vaccine is effective if it is used within a specific time frame and on the fixed population sample size. This problem is based on disaster management. You are required to build an algorithm to minimize the damage caused by this plague.

Data set

The dataset contains escalations of the plague for all the seven strains. The dataset is a time series in which the training set contains the number of individuals that are infected by the plague over a defined period of time.

The benefits of practicing this problem by using Machine Learning techniques are as follows:

1. This challenge encourages you to apply your Machine Learning skills to build models that can assess how many people are infected by this plague. In simpler words, this problem is based on the constraint optimization process.   

2. This challenge helps you to actively enhance your knowledge in regression. Regression is one of the basic building blocks of Machine Learning.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to defend the world against this plague by building an algorithm that can minimize the damage

Why should you participate?

• To learn and use the latest open-source libraries and packages such as TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, pandas, scikit-learn, etc.

• To analyze and implement multiple algorithms and determine which is more appropriate for a problem.

• To get hands-on experience in Machine Learning problems

Who should participate?

• Working professionals

• Data science or Machine Learning enthusiasts

• College students (if you understand the basics of predictive modelling)

Tutorials

• Machine Learning practice

Note:

• In order to be able to claim your prizes, your HackerEarth profile must be completed more than 50%.
• The prizes will be disbursed in the first week of the following month.
• Ratings of the particular challenge will be updated in the user profile within 5 days after the challenge is over

1. Your output will be evaluated only for 50% of the test data while the contest is running. Once the contest is over, output for the remaining 50% of the data will be eval...