Intro Data Science/Kaggle update

The semester is over, so here’s a little update about the Intro to Data Science class (previous post).

Kaggle Final Project

The final project was a Kaggle competition to predict standardized test essay grades. Although I still had lots of ideas, when I wrapped up a week early I was in first on the public leaderboard, and maintained that to the end. After it was over the private results gave first to Maura, who implemented some awesome ensembling. For commentary take a look at Rachel’s blog post. There’s a bit of discussion in the forum, including my write up of my code.

Visualization

During the competition I maintained a visualization of the leaderboard, which shows everyone’s best scores at that moment. Will Cukierski at Kaggle appreciated it, and apparently the collective impetus of Rachel and I encouraged them to make a competition out of visualizing the leaderboard! See Rachel’s blog post about it for some more info (and a nice write up about my mistakes).

Now back to studying for finals…