Draper Satellite Image Chronology: Pure ML Solution Damien Soukhavong

The Draper Satellite Image Chronology Competition (Chronos) ran on Kaggle from April to June 2016. This competition, which was novel in a number of ways, challenged Kagglers to put order to time and space. That is, given a dataset of satellite images taken over the span of five days, the 424 brave competitors were required to determine their correct order. The challenge, which Draper hosted in order to contribute to a deeper understanding of how to process and analyze images, was a first for Kaggle--it allowed hand annotation as long as processes used were replicable. While the winners of the competition used a mixture of machine learning, human intuition, and brute force, Damien Soukhavong (Laurae), a Competitions and Discussion Expert on Kaggle, explains in this interview how factors like the limited number of training samples which deterred others from using pure machine learning methods appealed to him.