Jeremy Howard, formally of Kaggle gave a presentation at the University of San Francisco in mid 2013. In that presentation he touched on some of the broader benefits of machine learning competitions like those held on Kaggle. In this post you will discover 5 points I extracted from this talk that will motivate you to […]
How do you get good at Kaggle competitions? It is a common question I get asked. The best advice for getting started and getting good is to consistently participate in competitions. You cannot help but get better at machine learning. A recent post by Triskelion titled “Reflecting back on one year of Kaggle contests” bares […]
The predictions you make with a predictive model do not matter, it is the use of those predictions that matters. Jeremy Howard was the President and Chief Scientist of Kaggle, the competitive machine learning platform. In 2012 he presented at the O’reilly Strata conference on what he called the Drivetrain Approach for building “data products” […]
David Kofoed Wind posted an article to the Kaggle blog No Free Hunch titled “Learning from the best“. In the post, David summarized 6 key areas related to participating and doing well in competitive machine learning with quotes from top performing kagglers. In this post you will discover the key heuristics for doing well in […]
Colorado Reed from Metacademy wrote a great post recently titled “Level-Up Your Machine Learning” to answer the question he often receives of: What should I do if I want to get ‘better’ at machine learning, but I don’t know what I want to learn? In this post you will discover a summary of Colorado recommendations […]
In this post you will discover 8 recipes for non-linear classification in R. Each recipe is ready for you to copy and paste and modify for your own problem. All recipes in this post use the iris flowers dataset provided with R in the datasets package. The dataset describes the measurements if iris flowers and requires classification of […]
In this post you will discover recipes for 3 linear classification algorithms in R. All recipes in this post use the iris flowers dataset provided with R in the datasets package. The dataset describes the measurements if iris flowers and requires classification of each observation to one of three flower species. Let’s get started. Logistic […]
What if you could use a predictive model to find new combinations of attributes that do not exist in the data but could be valuable. In Chapter 10 of Applied Predictive Modeling, Kuhn and Johnson provide a case study that does just this. It’s a fascinating and creative example of how to use a predictive […]
Data preparation can make or break the predictive ability of your model. In Chapter 3 of their book Applied Predictive Modeling, Kuhn and Johnson introduce the process of data preparation. They refer to it as the addition, deletion or transformation of training set data. In this post you will discover the data pre-process steps that […]
In their book Applied Predictive Modeling, Kuhn and Johnson comment early on the trade-off of model prediction accuracy versus model interpretation. For a given problem, it is critical to have a clear idea of the which is a priority, accuracy or explainability so that this trade-off can be made explicitly rather than implicitly. In this […]
