SAS and Goa Institute of Management’s Bitathon Leverages Data Analytics to Predict Bollywood Blockbusters

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India | 19^th March 2020: SAS & Goa Institute of Management (GIM) hosted the First edition of Bitathon, a specially curated hackathon whose mission was to create managers who understand the complex business ecosystem and can work with the new norm of data-driven decision making. The Hackathon was built on the very interesting premise of leveraging data analytics to predict Bollywood blockbusters. The participants were given an interesting problem statement around Bollywood – an industry often ignored by data scientists and analytical professionals. Success of a film in Bollywood is considered to be more of luck and little analysis is done on what makes for a successful movie and the hackathon challenged this popular belief. The problem statement covered various issues in Bollywood including 18 datasets that covered the spectrum of the industry including actors, writers, movies released in past 15 years and social media data. Teams participating in the hackathon were free to frame their own problem statements and come up with suitable analysis and solution to the problems identified.
 
The hackathon witnessed a record participation from over 600 students across 20 states of India. After two rounds of elimination, a total of 55 students went ahead to become a part of the 24-hour hackathon held at the GIM campus. The winning team – TEAM -1 (Nitin Bhardwaj, Priyanka Ghute and Chinmay Shahi from Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development ), had a coherent theme of analysis and a crystal-clear approach in their analytical process including setting the objective for movie success prediction, data preprocessing, exploratory analysis, model building, selection, validation and finally deploying the model as a web-app. The app takes the inputs like director, actor, actress, genre, release time and provides the output with success rating.  Furthermore, the app could be readily used by producers and directors to aid them in deciding the “success factor” for the movie.
 
The championship kicked off with a keynote address by Dr. Ajit Parulekar, Director – Goa Institute of Management, who spoke on the importance of data science for managers. “The importance of data science in the industry and its criticality for analytics-skilled managers cannot be ignored in today’s evolving business scenario. Across industry sectors, future managers need to understand the importance of data analytics to manage their business. He further highlighted, GIM is one of the first management institutes in India to successfully launch a full-time Big Data Analytics program with excellent placements for our graduates.”
 
Dr. Anand Teltumbde, Senior Professor, Goa Institute of Management said, “Data Science is regarded as the fourth paradigm of scientific discovery, after experiential, theoretical and computational. The impact of this is often seen in management domain. Hackathons provide an environment for students to work under pressure to fulfill timelines and thus deliver the required outcomes. This is an important aspect for managers in any industry. The vision of Big Data Analytics program in GIM is to create data-fluent, future-ready managers.”
 
Bhuvan Nijhawan, Director Education, SAS APAC stated, “data analytics skills can help young minds solve industry problems in ways which were never thought of earlier. The opportunities arising out of combination of young mind and data analytics are unlimited and there is a whole array of industries which are being unprecedently benefited.”
 
Nirlap Vora, Associate Director, Customer Advisory & Customer Success Practice, SAS India spoke about challenges faced by large banks and how data analytics can help solve them. “It is very important for students as well as future managers to develop a mindset of problem solving and use data analytics to solve them.”