Together with my team I have won the challenge Beyond big data – Control the butterfly effect at a Hackathon organized by the chemical company BASF.  Over 24 hours we developed Python code to combine information from various data sources and analyzed this data to improve the chemical process and identify potential sources for errors in the production. The process was fun, but at the same time very challenging to integrate several rather unstructured data sources into one data set.

Our main finding was that besides obvious parameter (quality of the starting products, production cycle, etc.) other external factors such as weekday and weather can have a substantial effect on quantity & quality of the final product.