Practical Machine Learning Basics

This article describes my attempt at the Titanic Machine Learning competition on Kaggle. I have been trying to study Machine Learning but never got as far as being able to solve real-world problems. But after I read two newly released books about practical AI, I was confident enough to enter the Titanic competition. The first part of the article describes preparing the data. The second part shows how I used a Support Vector Machine (SVM). I used the SVM to create a model that predicts the survival of the passengers of the Titanic. The model resulted in a score of 0.779907, which got me in the top 28% of the competition.