This article is the third day of the Advent Calendar in Kaggle Advent Calendar 2019.
I hope it will be helpful for those who think "** Kaggle is interested, but it's apt and scary ... **"!
Below is a brief history of my career before I met Kaggle.
--Marketer ⇒ Consultant --From liberal arts (art history major) --Inexperienced in programming (just touched HTML) --There is only awe on the black screen ...
I was in such a state, but in the last year I studied Python & machine learning and managed to understand Kaggle. So, I will write to myself a year ago that it is good to know this.
--I want to improve my data analysis / machine learning skills --Kaggle Looks fun, but inexperienced in programming --Mainly marketers and planning staff
--Kaggle is worth a try!
In a word, it is the Tenkaichi Budokai of data analysis using "machine learning".
--Companies provide data and themes and hold competitions --Themes range from medical care, marketing, finance, etc.
――For about 1 to 3 months --Relatively long
--Create a machine learning model and rank it according to the prediction result of the model
――There is also a competition where prize money will be given to the top players --As of December 2019, the DSB competition currently being held is No. 1 for $ 100,000 (about 10 million yen!)
--Approximately 120,000 people (as of December 2019) * Reference source
Kaggle has five ranks depending on its strength. (Strictly speaking, you can get a rank not only by your strength in the competition, but also by your contribution to the Kaggle community such as Kernels, Discussion, and Datasets.)
--Grandmaster * The strongest ...!
It's no exaggeration to say that the people who work on Kaggle (commonly known as Kaggler) are spending a lot of time every day trying to compete in order to raise this rank (probably).
The number of people as of December 2019 is as follows
It is an outline and an image diagram of each rank. (It's just subjective)
Click here for rank-up conditions. (In Competitions) The Expert suddenly asks for a medal. .. .. If you are a beginner, you want to aim for Expert first.
There are three types of medals: Gold, Silver, and Bronze.
Click here for medal acquisition conditions. (In Competitions) Strict conditions vary depending on the number of participants, but the following is a guide.
I've listed three benefits of doing Kaggle.
Data science skills are difficult to measure without practice. However, earning medals and ranks at Kaggle can prove your approximate data science skills. Recently, the number of companies adopting Kaggle is gradually increasing, which is also evidence when stepping up.
As I learned by actually participating in the competition, Kaggle has a wonderful culture of sharing know-how and information, not just competing with others. In particular, "Notebooks" explains the know-how and trends of data science in an easy-to-understand manner along with the code, and is recommended for beginners.
Nowadays, machine learning is being incorporated more and more into the apps and marketing tools around us. With Kaggle, you can master the modeling process of machine learning, so you can get a feel for what you can and cannot do with machine learning.
There seems to be various disagreements, but there are three personal points below.
Matsuo Laboratory of the University of Tokyo, which is famous for machine learning / AI.
You can download the text of "Data Scientist Training Course" conducted by Matsuo Laboratory for free. This is amazing, it's an incident! The text and Python code carefully explain the beginner's graduation level of machine learning, so if you have difficulty understanding the contents of Kaggle, I think you should complete this.
▼ Click here to download the "Matsuo Lab" text https://weblab.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/gci_contents/
As I mentioned earlier, the "Notebooks" in each competition are a treasure trove.
If you choose a competition that seems easy to work on, it is recommended to copy the notebook with a high number of votes in "Notebooks". Notebooks with a high number of votes are carefully selected and easy to understand, so you can relive the flow from data acquisition to model result submission by copying sutras, and you can learn the tips of machine learning.
Kaggle is a basic individual battle. However, the competition period is as long as 1 to 3 months, and motivation may drop or it may get bogged down.
At such times, if you have friends who are doing Kaggle, you can share useful information (private sharing is NG) and encourage each other, so you can enjoy Kaggle even more.
Personally, I recommend the following three.
--Go to Kaggle related seminars (connpass, etc.) --Follow Kaggle on Twitter --Let's join the Kaggle community loosely
Kaggle is a great platform for beginners to advanced machine learning / data analysts.
When you're doing Kaggle, you'll be able to compete with TOP data scientists around the world, share information, and get taught. However, when I think about it carefully, I realized that this is amazing, and while writing this article, I realized it again.
We will continue to do our best to help Kaggle remain a good platform! (First of all, I want a medal ...)
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