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

Rock-paper-scissors

It is no coincidence that several problems in simulation competitions refer to playing games: at varying levels of complexity, games offer an environment with clearly defined rules, naturally lending itself to the agent-action-reward framework. Aside from Tic-Tac-Toe, connecting checkers is one of the simplest examples of a competitive game. Moving up the difficulty ladder (of games), let’s have a look at rock-paper-scissors and how a Kaggle contest centered around this game could be approached.

The idea of the Rock, Paper, Scissors competition (https://www.kaggle.com/c/rock-paper-scissors/code) was an extension of the basic rock-paper-scissors game (known as roshambo in some parts of the world): instead of the usual “best of 3” score, we use “best of 1,000.”

We will describe two possible approaches to the problem: one rooted in the game-theoretic approach, and the other more focused on the algorithmic side.

We begin...