I have recently finished Grad school at Colorado State University with a Master in Computer Science. I developed an interest in Machine learning and Data science through multiple courses that I took. Wanting to get better in the field, I am setting this new goal of getting to Master tier level on Kaggle. For people who are not familiar with Kaggle, it’s a platform where data scientists, machine learning engineers, statisticians (or anyone who’s interested in data) compete in challenging machine learning competitions derived from real world problems.

kaggle profile

Kaggle Profile on Nov 23 2017

The Goal

My current tier in kaggle is Contributor, that’s 2 levels from Master tier. To get there, according to Kaggle’s ranking system, this is what I have to accomplish:

  • Get 2 bronze medals: be in the Top 40% for small competitions (<= 249 Teams) or Top 100 for medium sized competitions (250 - 999 Teams) or Top 10% for large competitions (1000+ Teams).
  • Get 2 silver medals: be in the Top 20% for small competitions or Top 50 for medium sized competitions or Top 5% for large competitions.
  • Get 1 gold medal: be in top 10% for very small competitions ( <= 99 Teams) or Top 10 in medium to large competitions or (Top 10 + 0.2% Teams).

The Metric

Given that it is clear what I need to do to get to higher tiers, these parameters will be tracked monthly:

  • Number of bronze medals
  • Number of silver medals
  • Number of gold medals
  • Rank in each competition that I participate in

The Process

The process is simple: Participate in as many competitions as possible and get better and better ranks. I would imagine this will also include learning field tricks and learning from winning solutions for past competitions. I will also be writing a monthly post where I will update on the metrics and discuss the things that I learned from the competitions that I participated in during that month. These posts will be public on this blog. Also, all of my code and notebooks will be available on my Github

These posts are created entirely for my own personal progress tracking. If you are reading this, thank you and I hope you like it. If you have any thoughts, advice or topics that you want me to be write about, please reach out to me on my email.

Till next time!