Otto Product Classification Winner's Interview: 2nd place, Alexander Guschin \_(?)_/

The Otto Group Product Classification Challenge made Kaggle history as our most popular competition ever. Alexander Guschin finished in 2nd place ahead of 3,845 other data scientists. In this blog, Alexander shares his stacking centered approach and explains why you should never underestimate the nearest neighbours algorithm. I have some theoretical understanding of machine learning thanks to my base institute (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) and our professor Konstantin Vorontsov, one of the top Russian machine learning specialists. As for my acquaintance with practical problems, another great Russian data scientist who once was Top-1 on Kaggle, Alexander D'yakonov, used to teach a course on practical machine learning every autumn which gave me very good basis. Kagglers may know this course as PZAD.