Winners of the Qminers Quant Hackathon 2024

Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA) FEE CTU and Qminers are proud to announce the successful conclusion of the third Qminers Quant Hackathon. The competition attracted the brightest university and high school students with a passion for mathematics and machine learning.

Of the 104 teams that applied, 20 made it to the intense one-day final on November 23, 2024 to showcase their skills in a competitive environment. The winner is a team from the Faculty fo Information Technology CTU, second place went to a student from the University of West Bohemia, and third place was awarded to a team from the University of Economics.

The hackathon challenged participants to develop predictive models and betting strategies using real basketball game data and attempt to outperform a virtual bookmaker. The competition was divided into two parts: an online qualification round and an on-site final hackathon at FEL ČVUT. The atmosphere during the final was electric. Teams immersed themselves in tuning their models and strategies, and success in the online round was no guarantee of victory.

After 6 hours of tuning models and adapting their strategies, divided into 3 rounds where teams could react to each other, the following three teams stood on the podium:

  1. SHAQ & KOBE (FIT CTU): main prize of 60,000 CZK
  2. Degen (University of West Bohemia): 30,000 CZK
  3. its_all_luck (University of Economics): 10,000 CZK

"The level of talent and dedication demonstrated by all participants was exceptional," said Petr Zahradník, CEO of Qminers, who presented the awards and had a long conversation with the successful teams after the event. He added that the winning team had done a lot - an ensemble of neural networks evaluating players, reasonable features over teams, and a clear (and thus quickly debuggable) logistic regression. "I'm thrilled that high school teams also came to us, one even from Slovakia. They were great!"

The Qminers Quant Hackathon is a prestigious competitive platform for students who want to apply their technical skills in practice, bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and real-world applications, and learn about the principles of algorithmic trading. Congratulations to all participants, and we look forward to the next editions!

More information about the hackathon can be found at https://qqh.fel.cvut.cz.