Data description and format: The data sets for this competition are provided in a tabular format. The training data set, namely ismis17_trainingData.csv, in consecutive lines contains 12,234 records that correspond to recommendations for stock symbols at different points in time. These time points will be referred as decision dates.  Each data record is composed of three columns, separated by semicolons. The first column gives an internal identifier of a stock symbol (true symbols are hidden). The second column of a record stores an ordered list recommendations issued by experts for a given stock during two months before the decision date. The third column gives information about the true return class of the stock, computed over the period of three months after the decision date. It may take one of three values: ‘Buy’, ‘Hold’, ‘Sell’, which correspond to considerably positive, close to zero, and considerably negative returns, respectively.

In each record, the list of recommendations consists of one or more tips from financial experts. Any single recommendation is expressed using four values and put between ‘{}’ brackets. The first value is an identifier of an expert. The second value gives a class of the stock predicted by the expert (‘Buy’, ‘Hold’ or ‘Sell’), and the third value expresses expert’s expectations regarding the return rate of the stock in a future. It needs to be stressed that information regarding the expected return rates may sometimes be inconsistent and generally less reliable than the prediction of the rating, due to different interpretations of stock quotes by experts (e.g. not considering splits and/or dividends). Moreover, some experts do not share their expectations about the returns. Such situations are denoted by NA values in the data. The fourth value in each recommendation quantifies a time distance to the decision date (in days), e.g. if this value is 5, it means that the recommendation was published five days before the decision date. The list of recommendations in each record is sorted by the time distances, thus it can be regarded as a time series.

In order to additionally enrich the competition data, we provide a table that groups experts by companies for which they work (the file named company_expert.csv). In total, the data consist of recommendations from 2,832 experts who are employed in 228 different financial institutions.

The test data file, namely ismis17_testData.csv, consists of 7,555 records. It has a similar format as the training data, however, it does not contain the third column with true return classes. The task for participants is to predict the labels for the test cases. It is important to note that the training and test data sets correspond to different time periods and the records in both sets are given in a random order.

The format of submissions: The participants of the competition are asked to predict return classes of the records from the test set and send us their predictions using the submission system. Each solution should be sent in a single text file containing exactly 7,555 lines (files with an additional empty last line will also be accepted). In the consecutive lines, this file should contain exactly one class label from the set {‘Buy’, ‘Hold’ or ‘Sell’}. Solutions containing any other labels or with a different number of lines will evaluate with an error.

Evaluation of results: The submitted solutions will be evaluated on-line and preliminary results will be published on the competition leaderboard. The preliminary score will be computed on a subset of the test set consisting of 1000 records, fixed for all participants. The final evaluation will be performed after completion of the competition using the remaining part of the test data. Those results will also be published on-line. It is important to note that only teams which submit a short report describing their approach before the end of the contest will qualify for the final evaluation. Moreover, in order to claim the awards, winners will have to provide source codes that allow reproducing their final solution (in any programming language). All the winners will be officially announced during a special session devoted to this competition, which will be organized at the ISMIS’17 conference (http://ismis2017.ii.pw.edu.pl/).

The assessment of solutions will be done using the accuracy (ACC) measure with an additional cost/reward matrix. For a confusion matrix X, obtained from a vector of predictions preds, and the cost matrix C displayed below, the accuracy is computed as: \[ACC(preds) = \frac{\sum_{i = 1..3} \left( X_{i,i} \cdot C_{i,i} \right) }{\sum_{i = 1..3}\sum_{j = 1..3} \left( X_{i,j} \cdot C_{i,j} \right) }.\]

For convenience of participants, we provide an exemplary solution file, exemplary_solution.csv, as a reference.

• November 22, 2016: start of the competition; data sets become available,
• January 22, 2017 (23:59 GMT): deadline for submitting the predictions and the reports (the deadline for submitting reports has been extended until January 27),
• January 29 February 1, 2017: end of the challenge, on-line publication of final results, sending invitations for submitting papers for the special session at ISMIS 2017,
• late February 2017: deadline for submitting papers describing the selected solutions to the special session at ISMIS 2017.

The teams of the first two top-ranked solutions (based on the final evaluation scores, taking into account solutions satisfying terms and conditions of ISMIS 2017 Data Mining Competition) will be awarded prizes funded by our sponsors:

• First Prize: 1000 USD + one free ISMIS 2017 conference registration,
• Second Prize: 500 USD + one free ISMIS 2017 conference registration.

The award ceremony will take place during the ISMIS 2017 conference (June 26-29, 2017, Warsaw, Poland).

Andrzej Janusz, University of Warsaw - Chair

Kamil Żbikowski, Warsaw University of Technology & mBank S.A. - Chair

Piotr Gawrysiak, Warsaw University of Technology & mBank S.A.

Marzena Kryszkiewicz, Warsaw University of Technology

Henryk Rybiński, Warsaw University of Technology

Dominik Ślęzak, University of Warsaw & Infobright