Paypal's Datathon - Help make a breakthrough in ALS disease research!

This event take place on Friday, Space is limited, please RVSP only if you actually going to attend

Help make a breakthrough in ALS disease research!

Calling all data scientists, software engineers and analysts, this is your chance to make a difference! The goal of this Datathon is to help find a breakthrough in ALS research. Datathon will be an all-day data analysis and machine learning challenge, during which participants will try to extract clusters of different ALS patients, based on their clinical data. The primary dataset we will use will be provided by Prize4Life, an NGO dedicated to accelerating the discovery of treatments and cures for ALS. By the end of the day we hope to present the most fascinating insights from each of the groups. Lunch and beers will be provided, please let us know about any dietary requirements.

We hope that this Datathon can be a great starting point for teams to take their ideas on to the next level and compete in the P4L stratification challenge!

Space is limited, so please sign up early!

Schedule:

8:30-9:00 – Welcome

9:00-9:30 - Intro to datasets and challenge goal

9:30-12:00 - Break up into teams, working!

12:00-13:00 - Lunch

13:00-14:30 – Getting the test-set, Work session

14:30-15:30 – Presentations and winners

What is a Datathon?

A Datathon is a workshop that asks researchers to do their best to turn information into knowledge. It’s a format modeled after hackathons. The difference is that Datathons use research questions and datasets to advance knowledge, not to launch apps. At a Datathon small groups of analysts, data scientist and developers collaborate intensely to frame a research question, create and implement a research design, mobilize data resources and present their findings.

What is the goal of this Datathon?

The goal of every team is to cluster ALS patients using their clinical data timed by 3 months, and to predict their condition after 9 months.

The Datathon is a (mini) part of the new Prize4life data driven challenge, which started on July 21st and will be end on September 22th.

Who is Prize4Life?

Prize4Life is an NGO which mission is to accelerate the discovery of treatments and a cure for ALS by using powerful incentives to attract new minds, new people and drive innovation. They are now suggesting a new data driven challenge.

While most ALS patients die within 3-5 years, some patients, like Stephen Hawking, survive much longer. Prize4Life is now collaborating with Sage bionetworks and the DREAM Project on a prize competition, ending on September, which offers $28,000 for the development of algorithms that can stratify the ALS patient population into meaningful subgroups with distinct features. You can read more about it here (http://www.prize4life.org/).

The challenge is based on The PRO-ACT database which contains data from completed ALS clinical trials with over 8600 patient records, and therefore large enough for the sophisticated machine learning tools used.

What are the prizes?

Each Datathon winner would enjoy a PayPal 100$ gift card. The idea is that teams with good leads from the Datathon would be able to continue and be part of the Prize4Life full challenge who offers 28,000$ for the team with the best clustering and prediction model participating the full challenge