March Machine Learning Mania, 5th Place Winner's Interview: David Scott

Kaggle's annual March Machine Learning Mania competition drew 442 teams to predict the outcomes of the 2017 NCAA Men's Basketball tournament. In this winner's interview, Kaggler describes how he came in 5th place by stepping back from solution mode and taking the time to plan out his approach to the the project methodically. I have been working in credit risk model development in the banking industry for approximately 10 years. I have been lucky to receive exposure to big data and data science through previous roles but decided I wanted to teach myself R and to improve my machine learning knowledge. The best opportunity seemed to be to utilise Kaggle datasets where I could to help with this.