How I scored in the top 1% of Kaggle's Titanic Machine Learning Challenge

You don't need to reinvent the wheel, you need to know how to use the wheel to make your car better. The Titanic challenge hosted by Kaggle is a competition in which the goal is to predict the survival or the death of a given passenger based on a set of variables describing him such as his age, his sex, or his passenger class on the boat. I have been playing with the Titanic dataset for a while. As I'm writing this post, I am ranked 113th out of 11002 participants. You must be wondering how did I manage to achieve this.