Two Students of IPB Computer Science Program Win the BCA Finhacks Data Challenge

Kevin Joshua and Saeful Ramadhan won the BCA Finhacks Data Challenge. Both are students from the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (FMIPA), Bogor Agricultural University (IPB).

The competition which was organized by PT Bank Central Asia Tbk (BCA) took place in two stages. The first stage was online pre-assessment test, then the second one was a demo day held at Akmani Hotel, Central Jakarta, last November.

The contestants were not only students but also professionals who have been involved in the data field. Of the hundreds of participants who have registered, there were only 5 finalists in each category who were entitled to continue to the second stage. The finalists were challenged to process the data provided by the organizer.

According to Saeful, the data provided were a sample of customer data that has been disguised with a large amount of data. The competition had three categories. Kevin and Saeful decided to participate in the Credit scoring category.

“Prior to competition, we exercised intensely for three months. We used to do this in our spare time during class hours and after studying at the library until the library service hours were closed,” he said.

With their hard work and persistence, no wonder they could bring home a prize of 10 million rupiah. “At first we tried joining the fraud detection category but the results were not good. Then we tried the credit scoring category and the results were better,” added Kevin.

Credit scoring is a method used by banks or financial institutions to determine whether or not a customer is eligible for a loan.

“To complete the data, we tried many methods until finally we chose to use the ensemble method by combining three clasifier forests, xgboost and lightgbm,” concluded Kevin. (Ama/Zul/ZSP)