You can find lots of information on Kaggle about competing, but it is difficult to know what is relevant and also very expensive in terms of time and effort – so we put all the essential knowledge into one book. Konrad: My favorite part is Chapter 12 on simulation competitions. Reinforcement learning is a field I have been getting into over the last few years – unlike computer vision or NLP, it has yet to reach wider appeal outside academic circles. It was an interesting and educational experience to try and distill what I have learned into a useful introduction to that fascinating domain. Luca: I enjoyed writing about the history of Kaggle and the professional opportunities it offers.

Konrad is a data science manager with experience stretching longer than he likes to ponder on. He holds a PhD in statistics from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he focused on problems of extreme dependency modeling in credit risk. He slowly moved from classic statistics towards machine learning and into the business applications world. Konrad worked in a variety of financial institutions on an array of data problems and visited all the stages of a data product cycle: from translating: business requirements ("what do they really need"), through data acquisition ("spreadsheets and flat files? He currently leads a central data science team at Adevinta.