The TAMIDS 2018 Data Science Competition is focused on a large public data set—more than 110 million Chicago taxi rides from January 1, 2013 to July 31, 2017. The data includes the time of the day, the length (both time and distance) of each trip, the taxi fare, and information about the pickup and drop off locations.
The data set also contains anonymized unique identifiers for each taxi. This makes it possible to examine how trip revenue per taxi and the number of trips per taxi have changed over time.
The data does not include any direct information about rides with Uber or Lyft in Chicago. However, since Uber and Lyft have operated in Chicago since 2011 and 2013, respectively, the taxi data does allow us to study changes to Chicago taxi trips in response to competition from these ride sharing services.
Interest centers on building visualizations and predictive models explaining how the Chicago taxi business has changed over time. In particular, contestants are asked to consider how hourly, daily, and weekly revenue and trips for a typical Chicago taxi have changed over both location and time. By “a typical Chicago taxi,” we mean to imply the median value. For example, we understand “weekly revenue for a typical Chicago taxi” to mean the median weekly revenue for Chicago taxis. If we calculated the weekly revenue for each Chicago taxi, then we would consider the median for each week as the target value.
The data from 2013 through 2016 shall be used for training predictive models, while the data from 2017 shall be used for testing the efficacy of the predictive models built using the training data.
Entering the Competition
Registration for this event has closed.
Prizes
Graduate Competition:
First Placed Team – $2,500
Second Placed Team – $1,500
Third Placed Team – $1,000
Undergraduate Competition:
First Placed Team – $2,500
Second Placed Team – $1,500
Third Placed Team – $1,000