UNC team wins big at Duke Datathon

April 24, 2017

Ph.D. candidates Yunxiao Liu, Iain Carmichael, and John Palowitch, along with Yiming Hu, a Ph.D. candidate from Yale Biostatistics, took first place in the Duke Datathon on April 21st, 2017. The competition was sponsored by Citadel and Citadel Securities, in partnership with Correlation One. In recognition of their work, the team members received a $20,000 cash prize, were offered job interviews with Citadel, and became eligible to compete in the worldwide Citadel Datathon in November.

The Duke Datathon took place on the Duke campus, and began at 9AM. Teams were given a proprietary data set containing millions of U.S. job listings, along with many freely-available data sets containing demographic and economic statistics over the past decade. Having diverse research backgrounds, Yunxiao, Iain, John, and Yiming used a combination of time series and machine learning techniques to reveal macro and micro factors that affect the evolution of job growth.