
AI for Trade Challenge
Competition Details
About the Challenge
The AI for Trade Global Challenge invites data scientists, economists, and machine learning experts from around the world to help shape the future of trade prediction. Teams will have to submit a forecast of the trade flows for the United States and China for the month of October of 2025. The forecast should provide trade values in dollars for the top 20 sources and destinations for the top 200 exports and imports of the United States and China (at the HS4 product level).
Eligibility
- Participants may enter in a team of 1 – 5 persons
- Teams must register to express their interest to participate and also to get access to the training data provided by the OEC
- Each participant must belong to a single team
- All participants must be able to identify themselves as natural persons
- Participants are required to submit:
- a plain text csv file with their forecast, in the following format: “Country1” , “Country2”, “ProductCode”, “TradeFlow”, “Value”
- a 2-page long method description is also required that focuses on how the model was created and implemented.
Dataset & Resources
Historical trade data for the US and China will be made available for all months of the year 2023 and 2024.
Expected Outcomes
We are looking for the most accurate trade prediction for October 2025.
By joining the challenge, along with gaining valuable professional experience, you’ll also have the chance to win exciting prizes.
Key Dates
- Registration starts on June 26, 2025
- Submission deadline: October 15, 23:59 CET
Evaluation Criteria
-
How Entries Will Be Evaluated: Predictions about the trade flows of the US and China will be evaluated respectively against trade data published by each of these countries (the US and China).
The winning team is the one with the best forecast according to sMAPE (symmetric mean absolute percentage error).
To be eligible for winning, all forecasts must pass a minimum requirement of having a higher accuracy than a forecast based on using raw trade data for July 2025 to predict the flows for October 2025 (historical data shows these baseline sMAPEs to be about 35% to 45%). -
Judging Panel: TBD
Prizes
First Prize:
3000 USD
Free OEC Premium accounts for 1 year for all team members.
Second Prize:
2000 USD
Free OEC Premium accounts for 1 year for all team members.
Third Prize:
1000 USD
Free OEC Premium accounts for 1 year for all team members.
Have Questions?
For further information or queries, please contact:
📧 ai4trade@centerforcollectivelearning.org
Partners and Support
- The Observatory of Economic Complexity
- Poverty and Equity, the World Bank
- Trade Practice, the World Bank
- Asian Development Bank
- Fundación Cotec, Spain
Academic Partners
- European Lighthouse of AI for Sustainability
- Complexity Economic Group, University of Oxford
- Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies, Corvinus University of Budapest
- Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), Toulouse School of Economics
- Global Opportunity Lab at UC Berkeley