Budgets for schools and school districts are huge, complex, and unwieldy. It's no easy task to digest where and how schools are using their resources. Education Resource Strategies is a non-profit that tackles just this task with the goal of letting districts be smarter, more strategic, and more effective in their spending.

The project is a multi-class-multi-label classification problem with the goal of attaching canonical labels to the freeform text in budget line items. These labels let ERS understand how schools are spending money and tailor their strategy recommendations to improve outcomes for students, teachers, and administrators.

To compare expenditure data across districts,schools budgets are distributed into certain categories in a comprehensive financial spending framework. For instance, Object_Type describes what the spending "is"—Salary, Benefits, Stipends, Equipment, or Property Rental. Other categories describe what the spending "does," which groups of students benefit, and where the funds come from.

Once this process is complete, we can finally offer cross-district insight into a partner's finances. We might observe that a particular partner spends more on facilities and maintenance than peer districts, or staffs teaching assistants more richly.

The right algorithm, paired with some human checks, will allow us to code financial files more accurately, more quickly, and more cheaply.

You can find out more information about the competition here.