无忧视频 Wins Citadel West Coast Data Open
January 8, 2022Share story
Defeating teams of graduate students, two groups of 无忧视频 first years placed first and third in Citadel鈥檚 West Coast Data Open.
Members of Harvey Mudd’s first-place team鈥擬ilo Knell 鈥25 (CS and math), Alan Wu 鈥25 (CS and math), David Chen 鈥25 (CS) and Forrest Bicker 鈥25 (CS and math)鈥攔eceived a $10,000 cash prize and interview offers at Citadel, a leading alternative investment manager. As winners of the West Coast regional, they qualified for the Datathon Global Championship and the opportunity to compete against other top regional teams for a $100,000 cash prize.
The third-place finishers were Sahil Rane 鈥25, Baltazar Zuniga-Ruiz 鈥25, Karina Walker 鈥25 and Shahnawaz Mogal 鈥25 (University of Arizona). They received a $2,500 prize.
At the competition, participants work in teams on large and complex dataset challenges impacting the global markets then present their findings to a panel of judges. Both teams were given a dataset from the research archive of Upworthy, a digital media platform often credited for the rise of overly dramatic clickbait headlines, due in large part to a series of A/B tests they conducted from 2013 to 2015. The teams analyzed and reported on findings of a dataset of Upworthy鈥檚 A/B tests consisting of 150,817 different article packages and the respective number of clicks each received.
鈥淕iven Upworthy鈥檚 interesting reputation for clickbait, we wanted to build a machine learning model to measure whether an article is clickbait and see what it said about Upworthy鈥檚 headlines,鈥 said Bicker, a member of HMC’s first-place team, whose members all share a love for computer science and machine learning. 鈥淭o do this, we theorized that fake news tends to look very similar to clickbait because both aim to pull in viewers, so we trained an AI classifier on an external dataset of fake news.
鈥淎pplying the classifier on Upworthy鈥檚 dataset of headlines, we found that fake news predicted clickbait more accurately than click rate alone,鈥 he said. 鈥淲e found that predicted fake news is a good proxy to examine clickbait that avoids the influence of confounding variables like overall business performance and external factors that are not accounted for in the Upworthy data. Using a variety of Natural Language Processing techniques, we also found that clickbait tends to use more extreme emotional language (very positive or negative) that is potentially harmful to the public鈥檚 mental health and emotional wellbeing.鈥
Bicker said the team took a learning-focused approach to the competition, using it as an opportunity to explore new analytical techniques. 鈥淲e wanted to push ourselves to think of novel, creative solutions to the problem, so we experimented with a number of distinct approaches. It was also our priority to bring a high standard of rigor to our work, making sure not to cut corners on our analysis and budget time appropriately for quality checks,鈥 he said.
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