Gradient Boosters and the RossMann (Project)

They took NYC Data Science Academy 12 week full time Data Science Bootcamp program between Sept 23 to Dec 18, 2015. The post was based on their fourth class project(due at 8th week of the program). As part of a Kaggle competition, we were challenged by Rossmann, the second largest chain of German drug stores, to predict the daily sales for 6 weeks into the future for more than 1,000 stores. Exploratory data analysis revealed several novel features, including spikes in sales prior to, and preceding store refurbishment. We also engineered several novel features by the inclusion of external data including Google Trends, macroeconomic data, as well as weather data.