The representation of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Warsaw (UW), consisting of students and PhD students, won first place in the Econometric Game 2023 econometric competition held at the University of Amsterdam.

During the competition, participants had to demonstrate their knowledge of machine learning, econometrics and data analysis. Twenty-six teams from top universities from around the world participated in the competition. The winning team from the UW comprised doctoral students Mateusz Buczyński and Michał Woźniak and students Mateusz Kijewski and Michał Kunstler. Their supervisor was Dr Marcin Chlebus.

This year’s competition task concerned predicting malnutrition in Africa. In solving it, the team from the Faculty of Economics at the UW trained a set of machine learning algorithms. The best performing algorithms were #LightGBM, #CatBoost and #NBEATS. Based on the eXplainable AI (#XAI) tool, the team also formulated recommendations for public policy makers.