DMA Analytic Challenge

The DMA Analytics Community organizes this Analytic Challenge, to engage the best analytic experts from around the globe to solve to a challenging business problem. Data practitioners and academicians go “head-to-head” to build advanced analytic models to find compelling solutions to support a real-world marketing challenge. Each challenge has a Corporate Partner, a Challenge Partner and is open to members for participation.

This Challenge has two objectives:

1. As an industry organization, the DMA focuses on educating the analytic community about predictive analysis, modeling, and data manipulation. The Challenge session and webinar are also intended to teach marketing analytic techniques to event attendees.
2. Recognize companies that achieve superior performance in analytics.

The 2018 DMA Analytic Challenge is to build the most effective model possible for this problem:

Participants will analyze a set of first-party data provided by a direct marketer of consumer products and develop an algorithm that predicts new customers’ six-month “lifetime” value to the marketer.

Starting Friday, September 14th and concluding Monday, September 24th, participants will build a model and score it on a hold-out sample. Each member participant in the Challenge will receive a data set(s) for model building and validation.

• No other outside data sets can be used.
• Submissions must be in R or Python.
• Only one submission per company is permitted.

The winners will be selected using mean squared error (lowest) overall, and the quality and clarity of the presentation of the prediction methodology and model development process. The top three solutions will be featured during a live session at the DMA &THEN annual conference, October 7-9 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The winning algorithm will also be shared with the direct marketing company for in-market use.

Each member participant in the Challenge will receive a data set(s) for model building and validation. No other outside data sets can be used.

Participants will be required to post a scored validation data set to the competition FTP. This will be used to evaluate and identify the top three solutions. Additional details regarding the evaluation criteria will be provided when the modeling data set is released.

1. Overall PowerPoint presentation (no more than ten pages) outlining:
   • the technical results showing the accuracy and performance of the model against the validation data set via charts and accuracy diagnostics
   • the explanation of model algorithm/equation- what predictor variables it contains and their relative importance to prediction
   • what each variable means/how it was developed, and a non -technical explanation of how the overall model predicts the accuracy of customer lifetime value
2. Scoring code must be provided when the scored validation file is submitted
3. Variable creation – variables that were used in the model, need to be traced from input to coefficient / node (if using a tree-based methodology). This includes all recodes, transformations, and summarizations. This information should be presented in a table, with English labels for variables, and equations (if appropriate) for transformations or recodes.

1. Evaluation results – cumulative gains tables – will be reviewed by the Challenge Partner and a subset of the DMA Analytics Community Leadership Council
2. The Judges Panel will identify winning solutions based on criteria that will be specified with the data packet
3. The Panel will not know which companies have won, but will know which models were the winners
4. The top 3 Winners will be notified in September

1. Winners must prepare a 7-8 minute session presentation and must also attend the DMA Analytics Community breakfast, both to be held during DMA’s &THEN Conference, October 7-9, 2018 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
2. Each participating company agrees to have a company presenter available at &THEN for the Analytic Challenge session, prepared to present. Note that you will need to register as an attendee for the conference.
3. There will be a check-in for participating companies prior to commencing the session. Any participating company without a presenter will be excluded from the competition at that time.
4. The participating company will be allowed to use company logos in the presentation. However, the presentation will be converted to a standard DMA PPT template for presentation consistency purposes. Your logo will be included.

Presentation requirements

This presentation must include the following components:
a) The types of exploratory analyses conducted to select variables used in the model
b) The steps taken with the raw data provided to convert into modeling variables
c) Any variable reduction techniques used
d) The steps undertaken in the modeling process
e) How the final model was determined to submit for the competition

The final presentation must be submitted to DMA by Friday, October 1, 2018.

All presentations will be reviewed and edited for content and educational components. As such, you may be contacted to review changes. Refusal to reveal educational content will be grounds for removal from the competition. By agreeing to participate, you are agreeing to fully share the steps and methodologies used in your model.

1. As a DMA Conference session, the DMA retains non-exclusive rights to the material presented during the Analytic Challenge session

Questions? Contact Lisa Merizio Smith at lsmith@ana.net.