Our sport is currently investing significant money in collecting far more precise tracking data in the hopes of improving equine welfare. Along with stride data, we can now collect measures for heart rate, EKG, longitudinal movement, dorsal/ventral movement, medial/lateral deviation, total power and total landing vibration. However, we do not have analysts with the appropriate expertise to help decipher these data sets.

We hope this competition allows us to interact with data scientists to help find solutions to equine safety issues as well as develop a roster of academics and motivated hobbyists who lead us in analyzing the coming generations of data.

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**Overview**
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Your challenge is to generate actionable, practical, and novel insights from horse tracking data that devises innovative and data-driven approaches to analyzing racing tactics, drafting strategies and path efficiency. There are several potential topics for participants to analyze.

These include, but are not limited to:
- Create a horse rating measuring expected finish position versus actual finish position. How does a horse’s expected finish position change through the running of a race? Does this metric rely solely on a horse’s own position or is it influenced by the position of competitors?
- What are optimal racing strategies? Considering different venues, surfaces and race distances. Create a jockey rating based upon path efficiency?
- Create a surface measure model which would rate the fairness of different paths on a racecourse that may be beneficial or harmful to finish position based. This may be a result of unknown barometric, weather or maintenance factors.
- Create a model measuring the existence (or not) and relevance of a drafting benefit.
- Create a model reveal optimal gait patterns. Does the model differ for such factors as age, distance, race section or surface?

Contestants should not feel limited to these suggestions.

The above list is not comprehensive, nor is it meant to be a guide for participants to cover. 

*Submissions that examine one idea more thoroughly are preferred versus those that examine several ideas somewhat thoroughly.*

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**Scoring**
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An entry to the competition consists of a Notebook submission that is evaluated on the following five components, where 0 is the low score and 100 is the high score. Submissions will be judged based on how well they address: 

**Innovation (25 Points Total)** 
- Is this a novel way of looking at tracking data? (10 Pts)
- Are the statistical/machine learning approaches using the most up-to-date standards? (5 Pts)
- Will the conclusions challenge the status quo of horse racing methods? (10 Pts)

**Relevance (30 Points Total)**
- Can the conclusions influence equine welfare, equine performance or rider decision making? (10 Points)
- Can the conclusions be the basis of future research on future (larger, more granular) data sets? (10 Points)
- Are the conclusions something that horse racing participants (e.g. owners, trainers, veterinarians) can understand, digest and debate? (10 Points)

**Competence (25 Points Total)**
- Given the data, are the statistical models appropriate? (5 Points)
- Are the conclusions supported by the data? (10 Points)
- Is the analysis accurate? (10 Points)

**Presentation (20 Points Total)**
- Is the writing clear and free of nomenclature? (5 Points)
- Are the charts and tables provided interesting, visually appealing, and accurate? (5 Points)
- Can the analysis thread be followed throughout the presentation? (10 Points)

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**Notebook requirements**
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All notebooks submitted must be made public on or before the submission deadline to be eligible. If submitting as a team, all team members must be listed as collaborators on all notebooks submitted.