Book Image

The Kaggle Book

By : Konrad Banachewicz, Luca Massaron
5 (2)
Book Image

The Kaggle Book

5 (2)
By: Konrad Banachewicz, Luca Massaron

Overview of this book

Millions of data enthusiasts from around the world compete on Kaggle, the most famous data science competition platform of them all. Participating in Kaggle competitions is a surefire way to improve your data analysis skills, network with an amazing community of data scientists, and gain valuable experience to help grow your career. The first book of its kind, The Kaggle Book assembles in one place the techniques and skills you’ll need for success in competitions, data science projects, and beyond. Two Kaggle Grandmasters walk you through modeling strategies you won’t easily find elsewhere, and the knowledge they’ve accumulated along the way. As well as Kaggle-specific tips, you’ll learn more general techniques for approaching tasks based on image, tabular, textual data, and reinforcement learning. You’ll design better validation schemes and work more comfortably with different evaluation metrics. Whether you want to climb the ranks of Kaggle, build some more data science skills, or improve the accuracy of your existing models, this book is for you. Plus, join our Discord Community to learn along with more than 1,000 members and meet like-minded people!
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Preface
1
Part I: Introduction to Competitions
6
Part II: Sharpening Your Skills for Competitions
15
Part III: Leveraging Competitions for Your Career
18
Other Books You May Enjoy
19
Index

Connect X

In this section, we demonstrate how to approach the simple problem of playing checkers using heuristics. While not a deep learning solution, it is our view that this bare-bones presentation of the concepts is much more useful for people without significant prior exposure to RL.

If you are new to the concept of using AI for board games, the presentation by Tom van de Wiele (https://www.kaggle.com/tvdwiele) is a resource worth exploring: https://tinyurl.com/36rdv5sa.

The objective of Connect X is to get a number (X) of your checkers in a row – horizontally, vertically, or diagonally – on the game board before your opponent. Players take turns dropping their checkers into one of the columns at the top of the board. This means each move may have the purpose of trying to win for you or trying to stop your opponent from winning.

Figure 12.1: Connect X board

Connect X was the first competition that introduced agents: instead of a static submission...