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Triskelion

3 karma · joined August 7, 2014

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Triskelion··on Reflecting back on one year of Kaggle contests
No, not yet. I'd love for Kaggle to be a place where analysts can earn a steady income, but I think that is something for the future. Right now even the top performers do not consistently win prize money, so they'll need a job on the side. If they are top competitors then this is usually a wellpaying job and so they are competing for fame and bragging rights, not prize money.

At my startup I do predictive analytics on whatever data I can get my hands on. There is an industry demand for fast and scalable solutions, which I fancy working on. Also Kaggle indirectly gives a lot of commercial opportunities and exposure. Perhaps in a year I'll reflect back on a modest start with ML as a career.

Triskelion··on Reflecting back on one year of Kaggle contests
The tricky part is setting up your pipeline: from .csv files to submission. This can take a day, or 30 minutes, depending on the contest. If feature engineering is required then this adds a lot of time to this process.

Time to create the first submission dropped drastically after a few competitions. I now have a small library of munging and ensembling scripts that I can quickly adapt to suit the needs. On the other hand, time spend on optimizing and staying inside top 10, increased too. For the KDD-cup I'ddo weekend long sprints for a few measly improvements. All in all I'd say I spend at least 8 hours per competition.

My background was front-end developer growing into analytics and dataviz more and more. I think it was on HN that I saw a link to learnpythonthehardway.org and I started from there. After reading "programming collective intelligence" I got more serious.