Jiacheng Zou Is 2nd place winner in Citadel's Data Open Championship
MS&E PhD Candidate Jiacheng Zou and his teammates received the 2nd place award in Citadel’s Data Open datathon championship hosted at Stanford.
The team's winning presentation was titled "Ride-sharing promises to bring convenience to communities where public transit does not."
Jiacheng and his teammates conducted an observational study focusing on whether New Yorkers who live in communities with lower subway ridership changed their means of travel between 2012 and 2014, the early days of Uber in New York. They performed stratified sampling over different age and income groups and found that younger people of all income levels were quick to switch to Uber from taxis and ended up travelling more in general. But in the same communities, people from older generations and with less income were not only taking a pass on Uber but also traveled less in general, which was likely due to the supply of taxis in their regions shrinking.
Jiacheng's research leverages modern statistical and computational tools to solve problems that were deemed too complex in social sciences, economics and finance. His current work includes building a model that outputs fundamental economic insights by analyzing 1.7 billion mortgage payment records of American families across all 50 states for the past decade.
Congratulations Jiacheng and team!
About Citadel's Data Open datathon
The Data Open is a series of competitions hosted at universities around the world to allow students to work through complex datasets and showcase their problem-solving skills. At each event, participants present their approach, findings, and insights to a panel of judges.
