A team from UC Davis has won first place in an international data analysis competition in Berlin.

The team from the Department of Statistics beat out the field of 120 entries from 30 countries to win the Data Mining Cup Tuesday (June 28), earning a prize of €2,000 (about $2,220).

The UC Davis team members — Minjie Fan, Qi Gao, Hao Ji, Nana Wang, Jilei Yang and Chunzhe Zhang — came out of the course “Statistical Practice and Data Analysis” (Statistics 260), and traveled to Berlin as one of the top 10 teams.

“The class provides students hands-on experience with data analysis, and we handle all data sizes, including the big data in the Data Mining Cup,” Professor Jane-Ling Wang said. “I'm extremely proud of the performance of the team.”

This year’s competition focused on online fashion retail, including the influence of rebates and coupons. Using anonymized historical order data from a real online shop, the teams had six weeks to develop models that predicted new orders and returns.

The top teams presented their models during cup sponsor Prudsys AG’s annual summit on “personalization,” or, as the data company puts it, “presenting your customers with the right offer at every touch point.” Winners were announced during the summit.

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