How to Rank 10% in Your First Kaggle Competition

Kaggle is the best place for learning from other data scientists. Many companies provide data and prize money to set up data science competitions on Kaggle. Recently I had my first shot on Kaggle and ranked 98th ( 5%) among 2125 teams. Since this is my Kaggle debut, I feel quite satisfied. Because many Kaggle beginners set 10% as their first goal, here I want to share my experience in achieving that goal. Most Kagglers use Python and R. I prefer Python, but R users should have no difficulty in understanding the ideas behind tools and languages. First let's go through some facts about Kaggle competitions in case you are not very familiar with them. Different competitions have different tasks: classification, regression, recommendation, ordering… Training set and testing set will be open for download after the competition launches.