Data Science: Beyond the Kaggle

A few weekends ago, on a snowy Saturday in April (not uncommon in Denver), I signed into Kaggle for the first time in several months, looking to play around with some competition data in order to while away the chilly day. My kids' endless chatter and my wife's disapproving looks faded into the background, and I blissfully wrangled data from the Expedia Hotel Recommendation competition for several hours. I submitted a few entries, slowly climbing the leaderboard until I got to the top 1/3 of scores, and then finally I got up to help with my family duties. That night in bed, my mind whirled with possibilities for what I could do with the data to improve my score – different variables I could use, several time-related features I could engineer, and thoughts about how to ensemble a couple dissimilar models together. I woke up early Sunday and fired up my project in RStudio.