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

Santa competition 2020

Over the last few years, a sort of tradition has emerged on Kaggle: in early December, there is a Santa-themed competition. The actual algorithmic side varies from year to year, but for our purposes, the 2020 competition is an interesting case: https://www.kaggle.com/c/santa-2020.

The setup was a classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) trying to maximize reward by taking repeated action on a vending machine, but with two extras:

  • Reward decay: At each step, the probability of obtaining a reward from a machine decreases by 3 percent.
  • Competition: You are constrained not only by time (a limited number of attempts) but also by another player attempting to achieve the same objective. We mention this constraint mostly for the sake of completeness, as it is not crucial to incorporate explicitly in our demonstrated solution.

For a good explanation of the methods for approaching the general MAB problem, the reader is referred to https...