Quandl recently sponsored the annual Big Data Big Impact competition, and we’re proud to share the winning team’s project today.

Undergraduates from the University of British Columbia — Benjamin Lim, Lilian Lau, Prapon Wongsangaroonsri and Taeyoon Lee — used Quandl’s World Bank data to examine the relationship between exports and GDP in developing countries.

The annual competition encourages students to evaluate one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The UBC team identified exports as a major channel for growth in Least Developed Countries (LDC). In their preliminary analysis, they created a heat map for GDP growth.

“Quandl’s API simplified our access to data, which helped us see the big picture faster,” says Lilian Lau, an Economics major.

As part of their report, the team performed a regression analysis of export and GDP:

You can download a PDF of  the full report here.

All four students are graduating this May with honors degrees. We’re excited to see where these up-and-coming analysts will go next!

Our thanks to DataSense for organizing the event. DataSense is a student-run organization dedicated to educating and inspiring the next generation of data scientists.