3 ms·

as far as i know, most kagglers are not students, but honestly i havent seen any data on that. I'll speak for myself, I do it because I love trying to solve in

as far as i know, most kagglers are not students, but honestly i havent seen any data on that. I'll speak for myself, I do it because I love trying to solve interesting problems and I love data science. thus far every competition I joined I learned something new and expanded my ds code base. I also really love the fact people post kernels and discussions I can learn from as well.

joshvm 9y ago
It's very difficult to win a Kaggle comp these days, not because of technical difficulties, but because you're up against teams of people with the resources to try a lot more hyperparameters than you. To a certain extent you can win with money - if you can afford to spend money on a bunch of AWS instances, that gives you more iteration time than one person with a 1080 in their bedroom. (So no, they're mostly not students.) On the other hand the problem sets are 'real' and it's excellent machine learning experience - importanly because you have the competition element, you get an idea about how good your solution actually is.
- autokad 9y ago
  in the zillow one, I was 41/3800, but I got over-obsessed with lb results and the first round of home sales my rank droped to 118. however, this was my first real kaggle competition, and I only spent a few weeks on it, (I'd say about 3 total). it was also one of the more competitive competitions, with a million dollars on the line. Its exponentially difficult to move up the ranks, but I do think its realistic to win one (though hard - as it should be). a lot of time, effort, and skills required but not impossibly difficult. I think kaggle would do everyone a favor if they gave out awards to more people, instead of the winner take all mentality. at the very least, everyone in the top 10 should win money, not just the top 3, with 1 getting the lions share.

3 ms·

as far as i know, most kagglers are not students, but honestly i havent seen any data on that. I'll speak for myself, I do it because I love trying to solve in

by autokad 9y ago

joshvm 9y ago
It's very difficult to win a Kaggle comp these days, not because of technical difficulties, but because you're up against teams of people with the resources to try a lot more hyperparameters than you. To a certain extent you can win with money - if you can afford to spend money on a bunch of AWS instances, that gives you more iteration time than one person with a 1080 in their bedroom. (So no, they're mostly not students.) On the other hand the problem sets are 'real' and it's excellent machine learning experience - importanly because you have the competition element, you get an idea about how good your solution actually is.
- autokad 9y ago
  in the zillow one, I was 41/3800, but I got over-obsessed with lb results and the first round of home sales my rank droped to 118. however, this was my first real kaggle competition, and I only spent a few weeks on it, (I'd say about 3 total). it was also one of the more competitive competitions, with a million dollars on the line. Its exponentially difficult to move up the ranks, but I do think its realistic to win one (though hard - as it should be). a lot of time, effort, and skills required but not impossibly difficult. I think kaggle would do everyone a favor if they gave out awards to more people, instead of the winner take all mentality. at the very least, everyone in the top 10 should win money, not just the top 3, with 1 getting the lions share.