The Jigsaw CityMandi Contest – Unleashing Analytics Talent

India’s No.1 Online School of Analytics, Jigsaw Academy, and wholesale B2B e-commerce venture, CityMandi recently collaborated to launch a live project for the students at Jigsaw.

The contest involved CityMandi’s data which was shared with the participants to work on a real-time project. The outcome would answer the problem statements as stated by CityMandi while simultaneously demonstrating the power of the tools SAS and R to extract, manipulate, analyze and visualize data.

The overall objective was to showcase how simple analytics tools can be used to derive insights from the information which already exists in CityMandi’s database.  From a learning perspective, participants received hands-on experience effectively using tools like SAS and R which are heavily used for Data Mining within the analytics industry.

The contest followed this format:

Data by CityMandi —- > Interpretation of the data by the participants using analytical tools  —- > Result

The contest evaluation was quite simple. The factors that were taken into consideration were:

• Problems in understanding approach
• Techniques used
• Insights to ideas
• Visualization techniques
• Presentation

The highlight of the contest was the possibility of a job opportunity via an interview with CityMandi. This added a new dimension to the competitive spirit of the contest.

The Winners

1st Place: Khwaja NR, who won a cash prize of Rs 10,000.

2nd Place: Aastha Gupta, who won a cash prize of Rs 5,000.

3rd Place: Deepesh Kumar Mohanlal Malviya, who won a cash prize of Rs 3,000.

Special nomination from City Mandi: Subhajith Ghosh, who received a cash prize of Rs 1,500.

What Participants Say

One of the winners, Aastha Gupta said, “The CityMandi project was a great learning opportunity for me — recapping the concepts I learnt in the Jigsaw Academy course, venturing into the territory of Retail Analytics by getting a hand on the raw transaction data, analysing the data from various angles, drawing meaningful insights from my analysis, visualizing the insights into something meaningful and finally marrying all of these to keep within the business objectives…  It is indeed a confidence booster and a satisfying experience to have my efforts rewarded.” 

And yes, there were many other participants who had the same view too!
To quote a few more:

Mayank Shah, one of the participants said, “ Thank you for assessing my work. It will definitely help me understand the area I need to improve myself in through the data analysis project.

I really appreciate Jigsaw’s effort to introduce us with such a contest. The experience was really good and the data was really challenging to work with. Ultimately it will help students like me to strengthen our weaker areas and give us good and needed exposure to real-time corporate data.

Looking forward to participating in any such contest in the future. Thank you, Team Jigsaw, and CityMandi. Congratulations to all the winners and to all the participants who gave in their final submissions.”

Bisawajeet Dasmajumadar, another participant said, “Yes. All is going pretty well …:-) A bit disappointed, that I couldn’t win this time…:-( But will be on the winner’s list one day). The CityMandi contest was a really good experience for me…Learnt and applied the Pareto principle using R, also the Time Series forecasting model was good learning.”

Our top four winners were awarded cash prizes under the CityMandi Online Award program. There were also letters of appreciation and recommendation handed out to them.

Expert Speak

Speaking on the occasion, Sarita Digumarti, COO of Jigsaw Academy said, “We were glad to see the enthusiasm shown by our students given the fact that it was an open-ended research study that dealt with corporate data that was not straightforward. We thank and appreciate the time and effort put in by all of them. We hope to bring more of such interesting projects in the year 2017. These projects  hone and strengthen skills in our students and help imbibe data exploration, analysis, and visualization better.”