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VODAN Africa Participates in the Women in Data Science (WiDS 2021) Datathon

vodan-africa-participates-in-the-women-in-data-science-wids-2021-datathon

At the concluded Women in Data Science (WiDS) Datathon 2021, VODANA Team was among the 1,773 individuals on the leaderboard, 24,479 entries, and nearly 4,000 registrants from over 85 countries around the world. 

The VODANA Team was led by Prof. Francisca Oladipo, the Executive Coordinator. Other team members were Dr. Sakinat Folorunso, the Nigeria Co-Team Lead, Ezekiel Adebayo Ogundepo, the Data Steward, and Muhammad Abiodun Sulaiman. 

In her presentation to the VODANA Community, Dr. Folorunso, who hosted the first-ever WiDS Conference in Nigeria, gave more insight into the Datathon, The WiDS Datathon 2021 focused on patient health, especially by developing models to determine whether a patient admitted to an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) has been diagnosed with a particular type of diabetes- with an emphasis on the chronic condition of diabetes, through data from MIT's GOSSIS (Global Open Source Severity of Illness Score) initiative.

�The team used a large dataset with dimensions (130157, 181) to predict whether a patient has been diagnosed with a particular type of diabetes or not.�

The team made 15 submissions by using different models such as Light GBM, XGBoost, Catboost, SVM, and ANN. 

Under the Public Leaderboard, which was calculated with approximately 70% of the test data, the VODANA Team was at the top 7% of the leaderboard. Also, the Private Leaderboard which was calculated with approximately 30% of the test data., the team was at the top 10% of the leaderboard. 

The Women in Data Science (WiDS) initiative aims to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and to support women in the field. WiDS started as a one-day technical conference at Stanford in November 2015.