Kaggle

My life over the last 5 years has been dominated mostly by a voracious consumption of all media ranging from books, HBO television (GoT, BRaking BAd,True Blood), video games, movies and the pointlessly amusing reddit.

So in an attempt to better myself I've taken up a few new hobbies. I'll start with kaggle because its seems more interesting than my other achievement this week (learning to sew a button)

Making data science a sport

So what is kaggle? Its a place where people gather and form teams to analyse data across multiple competitions. The teams that performs the best in each competition takes home the loot. Which happens to be $3,000,000 for the biggest open competition so far.This alone has convinced me that this won't be a completely pointless hobby. And even if I don't win anything at least the prize money shows there are many people out there that view data science as a valuable skill.

What drew me to kaggle was that despite having competitive goals in each competition, there is a strong emphasis in collaboration in the forums, and this is always a good sign for a beginner. And like most people I have an interest in data. Well I think most people like data, I only assume so because elections are always about polling numbers it seems.

The first kaggle competition I've entered in is the Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster. 

Having seen the passenger list it seems that Jack Dawson's name wasn't on there. He really was a stowaway.

Having made one submission I'm ranked in the lowly 600s (out of 650). Oh well its a start and hopefully I'll improve in weeks to come.

Wish me luck.