The CoreLogic Machine Learning Challenge Students dive deep into real-world data

On January 27, over 30 students came together to apply their machine learning and analytics skills thanks to the corporate sponsorship and data provided by the industry-leading provider of financial, property, and consumer information, as well as a major service provider in the area of business intelligence and analytics, CoreLogic.

The initial challenge for the student teams from Chapman’s Schmid College of Science and Technology and George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics was to take CoreLogic’s dataset with approximately 66,000 data points and determine the elevation of the property using GPS coordinates and its surrounding topography. That led to the second solution, which was to determine if the home’s beachfront view was obstructed, whether it by another home or a hillside.

Students working on the challenge!

In less than 4 weeks, teams were able to develop learning algorithms to predict if a home’s view was occluded by natural or man-made features.  “I was blown away with the solutions this group of students was able to develop in such a short period of time. They went above and beyond the call of duty. I can’t wait for the next challenge,” said Schmid College computer science instructor Rene German, B.S. ’06 (M.S. ’15).

Computer science major Haley Kinoshita ’19 participated in the challenge and “had a lot of fun. It was great having the opportunity to work with a real-world dataset and developing a solution. It was an overall great experience”.

With the CoreLogic corporate team members on hand, student teams demonstrated that Chapman’s analytics programs produce graduates with the skills needed to tackle industry-grade projects. They were thoroughly impressed by the students ‘insightfulness in figuring out the commercial value’ and how teams offered applicable, real-world solutions in their design.

“CoreLogic’s generous gift to sponsor the challenge has created a unique partnership that provides immediate opportunities for Chapman students after graduation,” said Dr. Erik Linstead ’01, assistant professor of computer science and software engineering and program director of Chapman’s undergraduate computing programs.

This was the first of three CoreLogic Machine Learning Challenges where students have access to real-world datasets. We look forward to another successful challenge at the end of spring term.
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