Kaggle BIPOC Program Key Takeaways

Photo by myself; SWAG is just the start (or rather the end)!

After a busy three months, I have finally made it through Kaggle BIPOC Grant Program! It has been an absolutely amazing journey and I would like to share my top learning. If you like to know how to apply, feel free to check out my other article.

Non-Technical

1. The power of team

Don’t estimate the collective wisdom. Also don’t think you have nothing to bring to the table. We all have strengths and limitations.

2. Use the discussion board

Read the discussion board to check out other’s ideas and share yours if you want to. Kagglers are quite friendly; they won’t bite.

Technical

1. Feature Engineering

After this program, I would definitely focus on feature engineering more. Creating additional features has significantly boosted my model performance. But I have to admit, it is hard to come up with new features. That’s a top reason to team up or use the discussion board for new ideas.

2. Optuna

I learnt this from one of the mentors and tried in one of my deliverables. I spent 10 mins to adapt it to my use case and it returned 6 tuned hyperparameters in seconds! I was amazed as I had been waiting 2 hours for tuning 3 hyperparameters (all the time that I could have spent better).

Conclusion

This is by no means an exhaustive list of what I learnt during the program. But they are my top picks. If you like this article, please give me a clap 👏!