Book Image

The Kaggle Workbook

By : Konrad Banachewicz, Luca Massaron
5 (1)
Book Image

The Kaggle Workbook

5 (1)
By: Konrad Banachewicz, Luca Massaron

Overview of this book

More than 80,000 Kaggle novices currently participate in Kaggle competitions. To help them navigate the often-overwhelming world of Kaggle, two Grandmasters put their heads together to write The Kaggle Book, which made plenty of waves in the community. Now, they’ve come back with an even more practical approach based on hands-on exercises that can help you start thinking like an experienced data scientist. In this book, you’ll get up close and personal with four extensive case studies based on past Kaggle competitions. You’ll learn how bright minds predicted which drivers would likely avoid filing insurance claims in Brazil and see how expert Kagglers used gradient-boosting methods to model Walmart unit sales time-series data. Get into computer vision by discovering different solutions for identifying the type of disease present on cassava leaves. And see how the Kaggle community created predictive algorithms to solve the natural language processing problem of subjective question-answering. You can use this workbook as a supplement alongside The Kaggle Book or on its own alongside resources available on the Kaggle website and other online communities. Whatever path you choose, this workbook will help make you a formidable Kaggle competitor.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Assembling public and private predictions

You can see an example of how we assembled the predictions for both the public and private leaderboards here:

What changes between the public and private submissions is just the different last training day: it determines what days we are going to predict. The public leaderboard notebook has the last training day set to 1,913, and the private one has it set to 1,941. You can actually, just for validation purposes, create other versions of the public version notebook using these dates for creating past holdout validation sets: [1885, 1857, 1829, 1577]. Hence the notebook will produce predictions that you can test locally for confirming the predictive capability of the model.

Exercise 6

Please try different holdout...