Kaggle: A Best Place to Start for Data Scientists

Have you ever wondered how to get started as a data scientist? Kaggle is a great platform for you to showcase your skills in programming and data analysis! Make your first submission on Kaggle and modify your submissions to make your way to the top!

Kaggle was founded in 2010 as a platform that provides predictive modelling and analytics competitions on which companies and researchers post their data. Data scientists and statisticians from all over the world compete to produce the best predictive models.

My first ever competition on Kaggle was the "Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster." There are numerous tutorials online and you can definitely find one that fits you. I personally program a lot in R, so I found this tutorial very helpful. Running Kernels is also a great process to learn how other people think, and help you form your own strategies to tackle the problem. Megan Risdal's Kernel reminded me of how messy the data was and what would be the appropriate trimming procedures. My first submission ended up scoring 694 out of 5799 submissions (top 12%), which wasn't bad at all!