In this first chapter, you will get exposure to the Kaggle competition process. You will train a model and prepare a csv file ready for submission. You will learn the difference between Public and Private test splits, and how to prevent overfitting.

Competitions overview

Explore train data

Explore test data

Prepare your first submission

Determine a problem type

Train a simple model

Prepare a submission

Public vs Private leaderboard

What model is overfitting?

Train XGBoost models

Explore overfitting XGBoost

Kaggle competitions process

Now that you know the basics of Kaggle competitions, you will learn how to study the specific problem at hand. You will practice EDA and get to establish correct local validation strategies. You will also learn about data leakage.

Understand the problem

Understand the problem type

Define a competition metric

Initial EDA

EDA statistics

EDA plots I

EDA plots II

Local validation

K-fold cross-validation

Stratified K-fold

Validation usage

Time K-fold

Overall validation score

Dive into the Competition

You will now get exposure to different types of features. You will modify existing features and create new ones. Also, you will treat the missing data accordingly.

Feature engineering

Arithmetical features

Date features

Categorical features

Label encoding

One-Hot encoding

Target encoding

Mean target encoding

Beyond binary classification

Missing data

Find missing data

Impute missing data

Feature Engineering

Time to bring everything together and build some models! In this last chapter, you will build a base model before tuning some hyperparameters and improving your results with ensembles. You will then get some final tips and tricks to help you compete more efficiently.

Baseline model

Replicate validation score

Baseline based on the date

Baseline based on the gradient boosting

Hyperparameter tuning

Grid search

2D grid search

Model ensembling

Model blending

Model stacking I

Model stacking II

Final tips

Testing Kaggle forum ideas

Select final submissions

Final thoughts

Modeling

Demand forecasting (train)

Demand forecasting (test)

House prices (train)

House prices (test)

Taxi rides (train)

Taxi rides (test)

Kaggle is the most famous platform for Data Science competitions. Taking part in such competitions allows you to work with real-world datasets, explore various machine learning problems, compete with other participants and, finally, get invaluable hands-on experience. In this course, you will learn how to approach and structure any Data Science competition. You will be able to select the correct local validation scheme and to avoid overfitting. Moreover, you will master advanced feature engineering together with model ensembling approaches. All these techniques will be practiced on Kaggle competitions datasets.

Extreme Gradient Boosting with XGBoost

Find out what it takes to win Kaggle competitions, from having the right approach to choosing the right validation scheme for any data science competition.

Winning a Kaggle Competition in Python

Learn how to approach and win competitions on Kaggle.

Machine Learning Scientist in Python

Understand the problem type

Winning a Kaggle Competition in Python

Hands-on interactive exercise