How to Win a Data Science Competition: Learn from Top Kagglers

There is a new online course on Coursera about Kaggle. It is a part of Advanced Machine Learning specialization.

It is taught by four Russian grandmasters and a well known number three in current rating - Μαριος Μιχαηλιδης (aka KazAnova, creator of StackNet).

The course covers such topics as:

  • data leakages
  • feature preprocessing and generation
  • hyperparameter optimization
  • ensembling

Pros:
:heavy_plus_sign: very practical
:heavy_plus_sign: learn from top guys
:heavy_plus_sign: things that never been taught before

Cons:
:heavy_minus_sign: Russian accent
:heavy_minus_sign: raw homeworks with little explanation
:heavy_minus_sign: $50 per month

Correlation does not imply causation but I took it and became number 160 on Kaggle in three months :slight_smile:

Highly recommend to audit it at least!

18 Likes

@jeremy this is the course I told you about on yesterday’s lecture

Thanks that’s great!

great resource, thanks for sharing @ppleskov!

Thanks!

If anything that’s a Pro! :smile:

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Currently I am going through the course I think its worth giving a try. If anyone here is worried that this course gonna be bad and a waste of time, I my opinion I would say there is nothing to lose. Its a good course.

Note:- Bear the Russian accent. :smile:

@ppleskov thanks for sharing… What was your rank prior to taking the course… we might then be able to make a better comparison…
super excited about this one…

A simple lifehack: setting video speed to 150% will make it much more bearable. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Going to start with this one! Have been searching for something like this. Thanks a lot!!

Half-way through the course:

Positive:

  • don’t spend much time on basics (assumes prior experience with ML)
  • focuses on topics that are not typically covered in depth (data preparation, leakage, metrics, optimizations etc.)
  • combination of videos, notebooks and external links
  • builds towards a final project

Negative:

  • not about deep learning (actually, most Kaggle competitions are better won using boosted trees)
  • skills learned on Kaggle are a bit different from real-world ML
  • $50/month, although you can audit (access all the materials) for free
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@nahso I didn’t have rating at all so no reference point. but this course and Jeremy’s advice to improve score every day and optimize rating were most valuable for me

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I agree with you. @ppleskov

Two weeks into the course - one major gripe I have is the assignments are not described properly. This leads to a lot of confusion - but otherwise, plenty of new stuff to learn like data leakage, feature generation etc which usually are not foccused in other courses.

Great course!
Some courses teach you theory and when it gets to practical coding you basically just fill in small sections in a ready made code.
Other courses just give you coding exercises without going too much into theory.
This one gets it right with challenging theory questions and practical exercises.

Definitely recommend!

P.S.
It’s part of a specialization.
I’ve only gone through two courses, but so far it seems like a great set of courses.

Hi, thanks for sharing useful information related to data science.From here I know more about it.