February 19, 2018

Tauranga Hackathon: Data Science for Financial Portfolios

By

Theta

Last month, consultants from our analytics and innovation lab teams were part of a hackathon at Craigs Investment Partners in Tauranga.

During the hackathon our new data scientist Sergei Dumnov worked with Peter George, Jim Taylor and the team at Craigs Investment Partners to use data science techniques for financial portfolio data exploration and visualisation, and portfolio optimisation. We also developed a machine learning model for stock assets classification.

As a result of the two-day hackathon the Craigs team became familiar with various R and Python packages for portfolio analysis and optimisation and received copies of the R and Python code presented.

We also discussed how the work we did could be used in production, by deploying the models on R server and using Power BI to embed the models within existing web application.

Cross functional teams

There are lots of benefits from participating in hackathons like this - for all participants - one of the reasons it's a model we really like! Says Theta's Emerging Technologies Architect, Jim Taylor:

"From my point of view it was a first chance to see R in action, and I was impressed at how much could be achieved by a skilled programmer in a concise way."

Innovation lab comes to you

Our innovation lab has organised and been part of several hackathons, bringing together developers, business owners, executives and creative thinkers to work on one or more digital projects.