My secret sauce to be in top 2% of a Kaggle competition

Competing in kaggle competitions is fun and addictive! And over the last couple of years, I developed some standard ways to explore features and build better machine learning models. These simple, but powerful techniques helped me get a top 2% rank in Instacart Market Basket Analysis competition and I use them outside of kaggle as well. So, let's get right into it! One of the most important aspects of building any supervised learning model on numeric data is to understand the features well.