FedCSIS 2024 Challenge

The topic of this year's data science competition is the prediction of stock trends. The dataset contains key financial indicators for 300 companies chosen from 11 different sectors of the S&P 500 index, from 10 years. Each company is described by values of 58 indicators that are derived from its financial statements. The dataset also contains information on 1-year change for each indicator, which can indicate a trend in the considered values. The task for the competition participants is to develop a predictive model able to accurately forecast stock trend movements based on the provided financial fundamental data. Such a model could have a vital role in algorithmic or manual trading, providing the trading signals for making decisions about whether it is a good moment to buy or sell the stock, or maybe not to trade at all. The competition's sponsor is Yettel.Bank (part of the PPF group, former Mobi Banka) – the first bank in the Western Balkan region where banking is done fully mobile.

Special session at FedCSIS 2024: As in previous years, a special session devoted to the competition will be held at the conference. We will invite authors of selected challenge reports to extend them for publication in the conference proceedings (after reviews by Organizing Committee members) and presentation at the conference. The papers will be indexed by the IEEE Digital Library and Web of Science. The invited teams will be chosen based on their final rank, the innovativeness of their approach, and the quality of the submitted report.

Terms & Conditions

Competition Participation Rules for " FedCSIS 2024 Data Science Challenge: Predicting Stock Trends”

By entering this Competition you accept these official Competition rules.

1. Organizer

The Competition is organized by QED Software sp. z o. o. (the Organizer), registered at ul. Mazowiecka 11/49, 00-052 Warszawa.
The Competition is sponsored by Mobi Banka (https://www.mobibanka.rs/) and the organizers of 19th Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems FedCSIS 2024 (the Sponsors).
The Competition is organized via the KnowledgePit.ai platform (available at knowledgepit.ai or knowledgepit.ml) and any submissions made outside of the platform will not be admissible.

2. Entry

The Competition is open to all interested researchers, specialists, and students.
Members of the Contest Organizing Committee (see the dedicated section on the Competition page) and employees of the Organizer, the Sponsors, and their affiliated entities are not allowed to participate.
Persons who are residents of, or are affiliated with or employed by or otherwise contractually or legally tied to an organization, educational institution, company, or other entity of the Russian Federation or another state or territory that falls under the scope of international sanctions or controls for reasons of war, terrorism or otherwise, are not allowed to participate. The current list of such legal restrictions in force in the European Union is available at https://sanctionsmap.eu/#/main. If you have any doubt about whether such restriction may apply to you, the Organizer reserves the right to verify eligibility and to adjudicate your eligibility at any time.
Participants must be of legal age of majority (Check your country’s law, in Poland and in most countries it is 18 years of age).
Registration for the Competition is done via the KnowledgePit.ai platform (knowledgepit.ai or knowlegepit.ml).

3. Timeline

A detailed Competition time schedule is available in the Schedule section (below) of the Competition page.

4. Participants and Teams

A person may enroll in the Competition with only one KnowledgePit.ai user account. Using multiple accounts constitutes grounds for exclusion from the Competition.
Participants submit their solutions as members of teams made up of one or more persons.
Each participant may be a member of only one Team enrolled in the challenge.
Each Team must designate one of the Team Members as the Team Leader responsible for communication with the Organizer.
A single KnowledgePit.ai account can only be associated with one Team in a given competition. It is not possible to withdraw from a Team, but Teams can be merged.
Merging is done between Teams by their respective Team Leaders through the KnowledgePit.ai platform and requires the consent of both Teams.
Participation in the Competition is free and voluntary.
Privately sharing elements of the solution such as code or data outside of Teams is not permitted and may result in disqualification of the persons or Teams involved, however, it is permitted to share remarks and ideas with all participants on the KnowledgePit.ai Competition Forums.
Participants must use their own resources, particularly software and other necessary tools and equipment needed to prepare a solution to be submitted.

5. Solutions

Participants submit their solutions through the KnowledgePit.ai platform.
The submitted solution is checked for errors, and if none is found, the solution is immediately included on the public Leaderboard.
There is a strict limit on the total number of solutions that can be submitted by a Team during the Competition and also, on the number of solutions that can be submitted daily.
For this Competition, those limits are set to 500 and 20, respectively.
The daily submission limit resets at 11:59 PM GMT.
When two Teams merge, their solutions accumulate, but the limits for the resulting Team remain unchanged.
If a Team exceeds the limit for the total number of submissions, the Team will be unable to submit new solutions until the Competition ends.
A team can select up to three solutions for the final evaluation, and the best of them will constitute the Team’s final score (Final Solution).
If a Team fails to select its 3 solutions for final evaluation, then this team’s solution with the highest score on the public Leaderboard is automatically selected as the Team’s Final Solution.

6. Evaluation

Each Team is obliged to provide a short Report describing their Final Solution. The Report must contain information such as the name of the Team, the names of all Team Members, and a brief overview of the approach used in the solution. The description should explain all data pre-processing steps and model construction steps. It should be submitted in the KnowledgePit.ai platform submission system by the Report Submission Date specified in the Schedule section of the Competition page (below).
The final evaluation takes place after the expiry of the Report Submission Date.
After the Final Evaluation, three top-ranked Teams will be asked to provide the source codes that can be used to reproduce their Final Solutions and Documentation that would allow running the code. If the code requires to be run within a complex environment (e.g. distributed Hadoop cluster), a detailed setup explanation should be provided as well. The source codes will be used to verify the legitimacy of the solutions and will be shared with the Competition Sponsors in accordance with the provisions of Section 9 below.
For a Team to be eligible for an Award in this Competition, a Team must be one of the three top-ranked teams. Moreover, a Team must provide the report and source codes upon request for the verification of their legitimacy.
In this Competition, the teams are eligible for monetary prizes only if their final solution improves the baseline.
If the Contest Organizing Committee refrains from indicating such a solution in its announcement of winners, the additional prize will not be awarded. This additional prize may be awarded to any team, including one of the winners of the main prizes.
The Organizer holds the right to extend the deadlines for submitting solutions and/or reports. In such a case, participants will be informed about such an extension through the KnowledgePit.ai platform Competition Forum.
The Organizer is not responsible for any consequences of technical issues related to the participant’s ability to access or submit to the KnowledgePit.ai platform, especially for issues relating to Internet connectivity. If due to technical problems within the Organizer’s control, the resulting delays or temporary unavailability of the platform or its components are likely to impact the participant’s ability to timely submit the Team’s solution, the challenge deadline will be extended by the Organizer by the time of such unavailability, and participants will be informed of such extension by email.
The final ranking of the competing Teams will be published based on the final evaluation results.
In the case of draws in the evaluation scores, the time of the submission will be taken into account.

7. Prizes

The Prizes are listed in the dedicated section of the Competition page.
Each prize comprises two components: a monetary amount and the FedCSIS 2024 conference registration fee waiver. The Sponsors shall cover a maximum of one registration fee per winning team. The registration fee is a prize component that is non-monetary and cannot be converted into a monetary value.
Each winning Team must select their representative Team Member to participate in the FedCSIS 2024 and notify their selection to the Sponsors. If no Team Member is selected by his or her Team to participate in the conference, the registration fee shall be deemed forfeited and not constitute part of the prize.
Following the announcement of the winners, The Sponsors shall pay the monetary prizes to the winning teams. Each winning team shall notify the Organizer within 21 days following the announcement of how the Team wishes the monetary prize to be paid out (single payment, split payments, etc.).
In order to receive the Prize, each prize recipient is required to submit to the Sponsors all documents necessary for the remittance of such prizes, such as their personal details, including bank account number, their certificate of tax residency issued by the tax authority of their place of residence or other documents required by law. If such necessary documents are not submitted within the time limit indicated in the notification of the award, the monetary prize cannot be paid out and is deemed to have been forfeited by the winner.
The winning participant who fails or refuses to provide the necessary legal documentation such as defined above will be deemed to have forfeited the monetary prize, and such prize will not be paid out. In such a case, the winning Team may select another of its members as the recipient of such a prize.
In accordance with the law, the Sponsors shall cover the tax payments required on the awarded prizes at the rates and on terms prescribed by law in the country of the Sponsors.
The Sponsors are not responsible in any way for any duties, levies, fees, or taxes that the winning participant may be subject to in his or her country of residence. It is the sole responsibility of the winning participant to inquire at the appropriate authorities about applicable documentation and/or tax payments that she or he may be required to submit.

8. Claims

Submissions are not admissible if they are in whole or part illegible, incomplete, damaged, altered, counterfeit, obtained through fraud, or late, or made or submitted in breach of these Rules.
Participant may be disqualified if the Organizer reasonably believes that the participant has attempted to undermine the legitimate operation of the Competition by using multiple accounts, cheating, deception, or other unfair playing practices or abuses, threats, or harassment towards other participants or the Organizer.
Organizer may at its discretion reject any submission or disqualify any participant if the Organizer reasonably believes that it was – respectively - produced in an unfair or illegitimate way or submitted by a person who has broken the challenge rules without providing any additional explanation.
If you think you were excluded without reason, or have any questions, please contact the Organizer at contact@knowledgepit.ai.

9. Data security, Privacy and Copyright

Each participant agrees to use reasonable and suitable measures to prevent persons who have not formally agreed to these Rules from gaining access to the Competition data.
You agree not to transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute, or otherwise provide or make available the Competition data to any party not participating in the Competition. You agree to notify the Organizer immediately upon learning of any possible unauthorized transmission of or unauthorized access to the Competition data and agree to work with the Organizer to rectify any unauthorized transmission or access.
Each report, paper, and any other type of publication based on the team’s or participant’s research where data from this Competition is used should accredit KnowledgePit.ai, the Organizer and Sponsors as the institutions that provided data for the study.
The fact of accepting the award is equivalent to granting to the Organizers and Sponsors a worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable right to use, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform, publicly display, digitally perform, make, have made, sell, offer for sale and/or import, the winning solution submitted and the source code used to generate it, in any media now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without further approval, and without any payment to the participant or participants who authored or co-authored it. By accepting the award the participants also acknowledge that they have full and unrestricted rights to grant the aforementioned rights.
By enrolling in this Competition, the participant grants his/her consent for the processing of her/his registration data and the submissions and reports, and grants the Organizer the rights to use such data and submissions for the purpose of evaluation of solutions, competition administrative purposes and in post-competition research.
By accepting the award the winning participant grants the Organizer the right to process his or her personal data such as name, address, personal identification or security number, bank account or credit card number, and other necessary details provided for the purposes of prize processing and payment, including the payment of applicable taxes.
By accepting the award the participant grants the Organizer the right to use the participant's name, affiliation, and/or prize information for the purpose of informational and promotional purposes of the Competition and the KnowledgePit.ai platform in any medium without additional compensation.
Participant’s data is administered by the Organizer and shall be processed in accordance with the European data protection and privacy rules (The General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679). For more information check Organizer’s Privacy Policy.

10. Final arrangements

The Organizer reserves the right to modify the Rules of this Competition, including without limitation for the purpose of clarification, correcting obvious editing mistakes, extending the deadlines for the benefit of participants, or other minor amendments. In the event of any change to the Rules, participants will be informed of them via the Competition forum.
Unless otherwise provided in the Competition Rules above, all claims arising out of or relating to these Rules will be governed by Polish law and will be litigated in Poland. Participants consent to personal jurisdiction in those courts.
If any provision of these Rules is held to be invalid or unenforceable, all remaining provisions of the Rules will remain in full force and effect.

Please log in to the system!

Rank	Team Name	Is Report		Preliminary Score	Final Score	Submissions
1	NxGTR	True	True	0.6584	0.772000	52
2	hieuvq	True	True	0.7376	0.800300	220
3	StockTrends	True	True	0.7228	0.802000	52
4	beamon	True	True	0.6980	0.805900	90
5	Pattern Pioneers	True	True	0.7822	0.807600	51
6	Team1	True	True	0.7525	0.809800	20
7	Stokastik Heinz	True	True	0.7970	0.818700	27
8	Data_Bombers	True	True	0.7624	0.823700	53
9	The Singleton	True	True	0.7921	0.825900	5
10	No-Name	True	True	0.7426	0.827000	39
11	TUmany Data	True	True	0.7030	0.830400	56
12	DataDiggers	True	True	0.7376	0.833100	66
13	Tsilkow	True	True	0.8020	0.833100	5
14	DML	True	True	0.5941	0.841500	401
15	O.W.C.A.	True	True	0.8020	0.843200	18
16	Amy	True	True	0.6485	0.845400	240
17	DataCraft	True	True	0.8069	0.847100	39
18	smatcosk	True	True	0.7178	0.848700	139
19	Dymitr	True	True	0.7178	0.849800	168
20	mk	True	True	0.7772	0.850900	11
21	baseline	True	True	0.8515	0.854800	5
22	unicas09	True	True	0.7277	0.857100	26
23	Akash Gupta	True	True	0.8416	0.858200	3
24	Unicas04	True	True	0.7376	0.862600	50
25	AIBrain	True	True	0.6485	0.865400	90
26	unicas14	True	True	0.7772	0.867600	118
27	l31415	True	True	0.8168	0.867600	4
28	Adam	True	True	0.8218	0.869300	5
29	Unicas15	True	True	0.7921	0.872600	40
30	undefined	True	True	0.8515	0.881000	3
31	team name	True	True	0.9950	0.903200	1
32	unicas01	True	True	0.7079	0.903800	67
33	DataCrusher	False	True	0.7178	No report file found or report rejected.	28
34	wxyz	False	True	0.7178	No report file found or report rejected.	40
35	unicas10	False	True	0.7277	No report file found or report rejected.	70
36	Khakisark	False	True	0.7327	No report file found or report rejected.	25
37	Cyan	False	True	0.7475	No report file found or report rejected.	54
38	Cena	False	True	0.7475	No report file found or report rejected.	5
39	unicas11	False	True	0.7475	No report file found or report rejected.	54
40	Hawk	False	True	0.7525	No report file found or report rejected.	14
41	unicas06	False	True	0.7525	No report file found or report rejected.	42
42	basakesin	False	True	0.7574	No report file found or report rejected.	11
43	unicas21	False	True	0.7574	No report file found or report rejected.	59
44	unicas18	False	True	0.7624	No report file found or report rejected.	13
45	unicas05	False	True	0.7475	No report file found or report rejected.	106
46	Hackafon	False	True	0.7723	No report file found or report rejected.	21
47	Statistik	False	True	0.7723	No report file found or report rejected.	3
48	Beta	False	True	0.7723	No report file found or report rejected.	2
49	rdeggau	False	True	0.7772	No report file found or report rejected.	38
50	recreativo	False	True	0.7772	No report file found or report rejected.	11
51	wdrz	False	True	0.7673	No report file found or report rejected.	7
52	TUmuch Data	False	True	0.7772	No report file found or report rejected.	4
53	unicas13	False	True	0.7772	No report file found or report rejected.	13
54	CUFE	False	True	0.7871	No report file found or report rejected.	13
55	VNteam	False	True	0.7871	No report file found or report rejected.	16
56	Unity	False	True	0.7970	No report file found or report rejected.	8
57	UseUrBrain	False	True	0.8020	No report file found or report rejected.	11
58	mya	False	True	0.8069	No report file found or report rejected.	1
59	unicas07	False	True	0.8069	No report file found or report rejected.	33
60	tch	False	True	0.7673	No report file found or report rejected.	4
61	Felix	False	True	0.8119	No report file found or report rejected.	5
62	1	False	True	0.8119	No report file found or report rejected.	20
63	IML-MIMUW-0	False	True	0.8218	No report file found or report rejected.	2
64	unicas	False	True	0.8218	No report file found or report rejected.	39
65	capybara	False	True	0.8267	No report file found or report rejected.	5
66	SUDHIR KUMAR JOON	False	True	0.8267	No report file found or report rejected.	23
67	buraczki	False	True	0.8267	No report file found or report rejected.	2
68	deterministicforest	False	True	0.8366	No report file found or report rejected.	1
69	sy-pl	False	True	0.8515	No report file found or report rejected.	7
70	kubapok	False	True	0.8564	No report file found or report rejected.	5
71	418 teapots	False	True	0.8564	No report file found or report rejected.	3
72	Mungosi	False	True	0.8564	No report file found or report rejected.	2
73	neil	False	True	0.8911	No report file found or report rejected.	1
74	Juul	False	True	0.9010	No report file found or report rejected.	5
75	mmoczulski	False	True	0.9406	No report file found or report rejected.	1
76	idcatc	False	True	0.9653	No report file found or report rejected.	1
77	ANickeN	False	True	1.0396	No report file found or report rejected.	1

The task in this challenge is to design an accurate method for predicting a trading action (buy, sell, hold). The available training data contains 8,000 instances with fundamental financial data in a tabular format (CSV file with semicolons used as separators). Each instance in data represents an event – a financial statement announcement for one of the chosen 300 companies. It contains information on the company’s sector, values for 58 key financial indicators, 1-year (absolute) change for each of the 58 indicators, target class information (the column 'Class'), and risk-return performance for a period after the announcement (the column 'Perform').

Please note that the data contains two distinct types of missing values that have different semantics. One corresponds to non-available/missing information and another one can be interpreted as non-applicable. In data, one type is marked by "NA" string and another is just an empty string (there is no value).

Solution format: the test data, containing 2,000 instances, is also provided as a CSV file. The test file has the same format and naming scheme as the training data but it does not contain columns 'Class' and 'Perform'.

Solutions in this competition should be submitted to the online evaluation system as a text file with exactly 2,000 lines containing predictions for test instances. Each line in the submission should contain a single number from the set {1, 0, -1} that indicates the predicted trading action for the event. The ordering of predictions should be the same as the ordering of the test set.

Evaluation: the quality of submissions will be evaluated using the average error cost measure with the error cost matrix given below:

	-1	0	1
-1	0	1	2
0	1	0	1
1	2	1	0

In particular, the error value is computed as: err = (confusion_matrix(preds, gt) * cost_matrix)/length(gt)), where the multiplication is done element-wise.

Solutions will be evaluated online, and the preliminary results will be published on the public leaderboard. The preliminary score will be computed on a small subset of the test records, fixed for all participants. The final evaluation will be performed after the completion of the competition using the remaining part of the test records. Those results will also be published online. It is important to note that only teams that submit a report describing their approach before the end of the challenge will qualify for the final evaluation.

March 1, 2024: start of the competition
~~May 10~~ May 24, 2024 (23:59 GMT): deadline for submitting the predictions
~~May 12~~ May 26, 2024 (23:59 GMT): deadline for sending the reports, end of the competition
~~May 19~~ June 2, 2024: online publication of the final results, sending invitations for submitting short papers for the special session at FedCSIS'24
~~June 16~~ June 30, 2024: deadline for submitting invited papers
~~June 30~~ July 14, 2024: notification of paper acceptance
~~July 9~~ July 23, 2024: camera-ready of accepted papers, and registration for the conference are due

Authors of the top-ranked solutions (based on the final evaluation scores) will be awarded prizes funded by the Sponsors:

1000 EUR for the winning solution + one free FedCSIS 2024 registration
600 EUR for the 2nd place solution + one free FedCSIS 2024 registration
300 EUR for the 3rd place solution + one free FedCSIS 2024 registration
special award of 300 EUR for the solution with the highest cummulative performance + one free FedCSIS 2024 registration

Aleksandar M. Rakićević, University of Belgrade
Pavle D. Milošević, University of Belgrade
Ivana T. Dragović, University of Belgrade
Ana M. Poledica, University of Belgrade
Milica M. Zukanović, University of Belgrade
Ivan S. Luković, University of Belgrade
Andrzej Janusz, Queensland University of Technology / QED Software
Dominik Ślęzak, University of Warsaw / QED Software

This forum is for all users to discuss matters related to the competition. Good manners apply!

Discussion	Author	Replies	Last post
Upcoming Deadlines	Carlos	0	by Carlos Wednesday, July 17, 2024, 15:01:09
Paper Submissions Instructions	Carlos	1	by Andrzej Wednesday, July 03, 2024, 10:32:22
Final results - Special award winner	Aleksandar	2	by Carlos Friday, June 14, 2024, 22:09:20
Final results	Aleksandar	4	by Andrzej Thursday, June 06, 2024, 03:45:06
Thank you for participating!	Andrzej	2	by M Thursday, May 30, 2024, 09:14:07
Data Understanding	Prachi	1	by Milica Monday, May 13, 2024, 15:46:25
Deadline extension - May 24, 2024	Aleksandar	0	by Aleksandar Wednesday, April 10, 2024, 09:05:50
Unable to merge teams		1	by Andrzej Tuesday, April 02, 2024, 15:53:36
metric code	Karol	2	by Dymitr Wednesday, March 13, 2024, 19:25:33
Time order	Dymitr	1	by Aleksandar Friday, March 08, 2024, 15:30:31

The main sponsor of the competition, Yettel.Bank (former Mobi Banka), is a part of the PPF group and the first bank in the Western Balkan region where banking is done differently - fully mobile. With its unique user platform for mobile phones and PCs, it offers innovative digital banking services, simple to use and available anytime and anywhere.