India High School Exoplanet Data Challenge

India High School Exoplanet Data Challenge — Uncover New Worlds with AI How do astronomers find planets light-years away? They don't see them directly. They watch starlight — and look for the faint, telltale dips that betray a planet passing in front of its star. Now, it's your turn. We invite high school students across India to step into the role of an astrophysicist and data scientist. Using a curated dataset sourced directly from the NASA Exoplanet Archive, your mission is to build a machine learning classification model that separates real exoplanet candidates from noise and false signals — the exact kind of problem professionals at NASA and research institutions tackle every day. 🚀 The Mission You'll receive a starter CSV file with real observational data. From there, it's on you: 🔍 Explore — understand distributions, correlations, and anomalies 🧹 Clean — handle missing values and class imbalance thoughtfully 🤖 Model — apply classification algorithms of your choice (Random Forest, XGBoost, Neural Networks — your call) 📊 Interpret — explain what your model learned and why it matters No astrophysics background required. Just curiosity, code, and commitment :) 🎯 Why This Challenge Exists Most student competitions give you toy datasets and synthetic problems. This one gives you real data from a real space telescope. We designed this challenge to bridge the gap between classroom learning and genuine scientific work — and to give students a project that belongs on a college application, a research portfolio, or a GitHub that actually stands out. This is applied AI for space science, and you don't have to wait until university to do it. ⏱️ Duration: 1.5 months of self-paced, hands-on work. 🏆 Prizes & Recognition 🥇 Top Solutions Published — Winning models and write-ups featured on our platform's newsletter and shared with the STEM community 📜 Certificates of Excellence — Awarded to all top-scoring participants 🎓 Academic Credibility — A real, portfolio-ready project backed by NASA data — the kind that stands out to colleges and research programs 🤩Something exciting — To be soon announced!! 👥 Eligibility 📍 Open to high school students (Grades 9–12) across India 👤 Solo participation or teams of up to 3 members 🆓 Free to enter