Wids Datathon 2021
IWiDS Stanford is gearing up to launch the 4th Annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) Datathon in January, in advance of our first 24-hour virtual 2021 WiDS Worldwide Conference on March 8th. This year’s datathon, organized by the WiDS Worldwide team, the West Big Data Innovation Hub, and the WiDS Datathon Committee, will focus on models to determine whether a patient admitted to an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) has been diagnosed with a particular type of diabetes.
Background on the challenge
Getting a rapid understanding of the context of a patient’s overall health has been particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic as healthcare workers around the world struggle with hospitals overloaded by patients in critical condition. ICUs often lack verified medical histories for incoming patients. A patient in distress or a patient who is brought in confused or unresponsive may not be able to provide information about chronic conditions such as heart disease, injuries, or diabetes. Medical records may take days to transfer, especially for a patient from another medical provider or system. Knowledge about chronic conditions can inform clinical decisions about patient care and ultimately improve patient outcomes.
During November’s American Diabetes Month various groups raised awareness about this disease that afflicts 34.2 million Americans or 10.5% of the population. And one in five people (7.3 million) who met the laboratory criteria for it aren’t aware they are living with the disease or how to manage it. People with diabetes are also at risk for more serious outcomes from COVID-19. Between February and May, a CDC study that analyzed 10,000 deaths found that 40 percent of those who have died from COVID-19 were living with diabetes. On a global scale, 463 million adults were living with diabetes in 2019, and 1 in 2 (232 million) people were undiagnosed.
What is a Datathon?
A datathon is a data-focused hackathon — given a dataset and a limited amount of time, participants are challenged to use their creativity and data science skills to build, test, and explore solutions. Try something new, apply what you know, learn from other participants, and improve your data science skills along the way!
The Dataset and Challenge
This year, teams will take a closer look at data similar to the WiDS 2020 Datathon data from MIT’s GOSSIS (Global Open Source Severity of Illness Score) Initiative, but instead of predicting patient survival, this year the WiDS Datathon will focus on creating models to classify whether patients have been diagnosed with a certain type of diabetes which could inform treatment in the ICU.
Who Can Participate in the Datathon?
The WiDS Datathon aims to inspire women worldwide to learn more about data science, and to create a supportive environment for women to connect with others in their community who share their interests. Toward these ends, we open the datathon to individuals or teams of up to 4; at least half of each team must be women (people identifying as female). Participants can be students, faculty, government workers, members of NGOs, or industry members.
Anyone from those new to data science to veterans of the field are invited to participate. For those who have never tried machine learning, the WiDS Datathon Organizers will be releasing a series of guides to help you get started with the algorithms and dataset.
How it Works
The Datathon will run from early January-February 2021 on Kaggle, an online community of data scientists.
Labeled training and validation sets will be provided for model development; you will then upload your classifications for an unlabeled test set to Kaggle and these will be used to determine the public leaderboard rankings and the winners of the competition.
Winners will be announced at the WiDS Worldwide Conference held virtually on March 8, 2021. Beyond the leaderboard rankings, individuals and teams will also have an opportunity to submit papers about their work to be eligible for an Excellence in Research Award from the National Science Foundation Big Data Innovation Hubs.
Getting Started
Make your plans to build a team, hone your data science skills, and join us in this year’s challenge focused on social impact. We recommend you:
Sign up now to participate, and we will send you the link to download the dataset on Kaggle when the competition begins (Scheduled to open January 6th).
If you have not previously, sign up for a Kaggle account here.
Join the WiDS community mailing list to make sure you receive news about the WiDS Datathon.
For more details on Key Dates and Prizes, head to the WIDS Datathon Details page.
Local Teams
Data Circles will be hosting local events in preparation for the WiDS 2020 Datathon virtually on Wednesdays. The initial Kick-off will be January 20, 2021, followed by office hours meetings each week where you or your team can meet with mentors to help you with your project. You will also be able to partner up with teams for the event if desired.
Head to Meetup for more up to date info on the local Datathon events.