The COVID-19 Houston Datathon is an online challenge to predict the regional hospitalization and mortality patterns of COVID-19 in Houston, Texas. This Datathon is jointly organized and sponsored by the Center for Secure Artificial intelligence For hEalthcare at the UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics, and Data to Knowledge lab at Rice University. Undergraduate, master, and doctoral students from the institutes within the Gulf Coast Consortia (including UTHealth, MDACC, UH, Rice, TAMU, UTMB, IBT, and Baylor) and colleges near TMC are highly encouraged to apply.
**The event will have up to $1,500 in prizes for the winners. This is an individual-based event (no team participation).**
Objective
The goal is to develop a prediction model using local county-level data to estimate the changes in Covid19 hospitalization (general beds + icu beds) and mortality case numbers in the greater Houston area encompassing 8 counties (Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, Galveston, Liberty, Chambers, and Austin) in the state of Texas, USA.
Problem
Accurate and timely prediction of local trends for pandemics will have profound implications to medical resource preparation and policy adjustment evaluation. In this Datathon, we will focus on predicting daily hospitalization cases and cumulative mortality cases based on previous observations. We will provide daily hospitalization and mortality statistics (together with infection cases, recovery cases, active cases, test cases) for eight counties (Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, Galveston, Liberty, Chambers, and Austin) in Texas. In addition, we will provide data related to population mobility, demographics, mask usage, which might contain features related to behavioral patterns affecting the transmission.
![](https://www.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/kaggle-user-content/o/inbox%2F4789964%2Fc4fd72f7b73844419ee2ba85e3b34701%2FTMC-Covid-Graph.png?generation=1598301363652420&alt=media)
Data Sources
Data will be updated daily until end of the competition.
- County-level mortality, infection, recovery, active cases, test counts, hospitalization: John Hopkins COVID-19 tracking data, USA Today, and Setrac Regional Healthcare
- County-level mask usage: New York time
- County-level population mobility: Google Mobility Report
- County-level data dashboard: School of Public Health, UTHealth
- (optional) COVID-19 Control Policies KFF
- (optional) Demonstration and protest
- (optional) Weather
For detailed data description and link of optional data, please refer to:
[SBMI Datathon Dashboard](https://sbmi.uth.edu/datathon/index.htm)