Yesterday, I posted about the popularity of data hackathons. Well, today let’s get started with Kaggle. This is the first of a few simple posts about making your first submission to a Kaggle competition. I also promise you won’t be last place. You won’t be first either. This is an excellent way to start developing your data science skills.

The Problem

The Biological response competition seems to be a good starting point. The data is fairly straight forward. The data consists of rows and columns. Each row represents a molecule. The first column represents a biological response, and the remaining 1776 columns are features of the molecule (technically, calculated molecular descriptors). Unfortunately, the data does not specifically state what each column represents. Thus, domain knowledge of biology is not really helpful.

The Data

For this problem, Kaggle provides 2 sets of data. The first file is a training set. It includes data with responses and features. Obviously it is used for training your algorithm. The actual responses are either the value 0 or the value 1. The second file is very similar except it does not contain the responses. It is called the test file.

How To Submit A Solution

Your goal as a participant is to run your algorithm against the test file and predict the response. Each predicted response should be a value between 0 and 1. After your algorithm runs it should produce an output file with the predicted response for each row on a separate line. Your submission file is just a single column.

The Ranking

To submit a solution, you just upload your submission file. Kaggle then compares your predicted responses with the actual responses for the test set. Kaggle knows those values, but they do not share them with participants. The comparison method used for this competition is called Log Loss. For a description of Log Loss, see the Kaggle Wiki Page about scoring metrics. The goal of this competition is to get the lowest score.
Note: only 2 submissions are allowed per day.

You Can Do It

That is my brief description of a Kaggle Competition. It doesn’t sound too hard does it? Tomorrow, we can step through making our first submission. Go register for an account, so you are ready to submit a solution tomorrow. Be careful, once you start Kaggling (I think I just invented that word), you might not want to stop.