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Bring Your A-Game: Optiver Launches First Data Science Competition

Optiver welcomes complex challenges. Working together towards ambitious goals is simply embedded in our DNA. With our endless hunger for growth, we enjoy finding puzzles that hone even our sharpest skills. And now, we want to see how others arrange the pieces.

This week, Optiver is excited to launch our first global data science competition. To reach the brightest minds, we’re teaming up with Kaggle, the world’s largest data science and machine learning community. Together, we’re tackling a real-world trading challenge: predicting volatility. We’re calling on data scientists from all backgrounds, experience levels and walks of life. Have you got what it takes?

Let’s test the best

Optiver operates on the back of massive amounts of data, so partnering with the world’s biggest data science community is a perfect fit. The competition itself, developed alongside Kaggle experts, confronts a big data volatility problem that Optiver navigates every day.

 “Trading automated and at scale is a fascinating data challenge,” says Trading Team lead, Andrew Meyer.“ Our Amsterdam office captures almost 1 PB of market data per year. Our traders, researchers and engineers are collaborating daily on which problems to solve, how and why. Kaggle has more than one million active data scientists trying to solve the most difficult data problems and some of our best hires are from the community. It therefore feels natural to engage more broadly with the Kaggle community by sharing one of our realistic challenges.”

Big data requires big ideas

Optiver’s first data science competition invites contestants to design models that predict realised volatility over 10-minute periods for multiple stocks. The task is every bit as challenging as it sounds, which is why the Kaggle community is welcome to compete individually or in teams.

To form the basis of their algorithms, ‘Kagglers’ will have hundreds of millions of rows of highly granular financial data at their disposal. Optiver will also share our knowledge of modern financial markets and how we improve them on 50+ exchanges using innovative technology. With online tutorials and access to Optiver’s data science team, contestants will be fully equipped to creatively apply their data science skills.

Optiver looks forward to seeing how Kagglers approach this ever complex but exciting business problem.

“We are always looking to learn from and hire the best,” says Andrew Meyer. ”We firmly believe the talented Kaggle community will apply cutting-edge data science skills. We hope our competition will also contribute to the greatest data science knowledge base in the world.”

Interested data enthusiasts are welcome to enter the competition.

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