From astronomy to data science using Numerai
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From astronomy to data science using Numerai
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In this talk, I will go through my journey of learning some data science with the help of the hardest data science tournament in the world. I'll explain what Numerai is, how I ended up participating in the tournament, and what I've learned from competing for almost six years.
Numerai is a quant hedge fund built on thousands of crowdsourced machine learning models. Every week a new data set is released and the users use ML models to predict the fate of the hedge fund. The users can stake a crypto token called a Numerai (NMR) on their models. Based on a scoring metric, users receive a fractional payout on their stake for performant models, with a portion of the stake being burned (destroyed) for poorly performing models.
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Dr. Rudi Khun
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Rudi is a SALT astronomer and has worked on Extrasolar planets detection using a wide-field camera that can monitor thousands of stars concurrently. This gave him the ability to process big data which was used in his data science career.
