Team RMB has been crowned the winners of the second Edition of the Data Hackathon Compétition organised by the University of Ghana Actuarial and Statistics society over the weekend.

The data Hackathon is an initiative which is geared at looking at how students can be able to interpret data and solve real life problems.

Students were in groups of 3, 10 groups in total. Each team presented a summary of their intense data analysis for 10 minutes to judges on the prevalence of Diahorrea in Africa.

After the presentation, a panel of judges decided on the Best in Show, Best Visualization, Best Use of External Data.

Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Ghana, Dr. Louis Asiedu said there's the need to organize such programmes to test the understanding of students if Indeed they understand what they've been taught and whether they can apply them in real life.

"Legon as you know is research driven , and we've realized that we are cutting off the industrial and practical aspect of everything, so we put this together to solve real life industrial problems by applying a lot of the theories that they've learnt in school. So it's going to be an annual event where students are going to be tested on the practicality of their course."

He also has described Ghana as statistically underdeveloped. He says the country lacks readily available data analysts can work with.

This he believes with the passage of the Right to information Bill and yet to be constructed centre for Excellence for data, will create opportunities for statisticians to access data.

The President of UGASS Akua Sekyiwaa admonished the in coming executives to seek more sponsorship to facilitate the programme.

"You know these events need a lot of sponsorship, so those who will take over from us should be able to get more people on board. We need to create awareness on a competition like this and believe the department holds on to and facilitate it every year."

The top 3 for this year's Data Hackathon were RMB who were the 2nd last year but won this year.

They say it has not been easy preparing for the quiz. However they look forward to influencing society with all they've learnt over the years.

Team Squash took the second place with 78.6, Team Yolo 3rd with ; 77.6 , Team FAM 4th with 77.3 while Team Statistical Devs and Team Delta both took the 5th position with 75.6 %.

Team Big Analytics , Team APS , Team KOT and Team Blue were 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th respectively.