The Solution Approach Of The Great Indian Hiring Hackathon: Winners' Take

MachineHack has successfully concluded The Great Indian Hiring Hackathon on 23rd of November 2020, where it collaborated for the first time with 12 companies to help data science professionals land up in a rewarding career. In this hackathon, the MachineHack community was asked to come up with an algorithm to predict the price of retail items belonging to different categories. In participation with companies like -- Aditya Birla Group, Bridgei2i, Concentrix, Fractal, Genpact, Lowe's, MiQ, Piramal, Scienaptic, Vmware, WellsFargo, and Zycus, the hackathon has witnessed an active attendance of whooping 5655 practitioners. Foretelling the retail price can be a daunting task due to the huge datasets with a variety of attributes ranging from text, numbers (floats, integers), as well as date and time. Also, outliers can be a big problem when dealing with unit prices. Thus this hackathon asked the participants to come out with a solution to forecast retail prices of items of different categories.