The Department of Statistics is excited to announce that Xianghao Chen, a first-year Master’s of Data Science student, achieved 1st place in task one, Sepsis Onset Prediction, of the 2019 ‘Discover, Innovation, Impact’ National Data Science Challenge. The challenge was hosted by the UTH Health School of Biomedical Informatics.

As part of the challenge, teams were asked to come up with methods of predicting the target, in this case, sepsis onset and sepsis mortality. Additionally, every team was required to provide a prediction of these two targets using the provided training data. Xianghao’s team, led by Professor Yuanfang Guan of the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan Medical School, experimented with different machine learning and feature engineering methods to produce the best method for this challenge.

In the end, all participating teams were ranked by performance, with Xianghao’s team achieving 1st place. Congratulations, Xianghao!