Building stackers, ensembles and watching Davis Cup LIVE | Weekly Report 35

10 Apr 2017 . category: report . Comments
#data science #kaggle #bangalore #tennis #fitness

My weekly report from the 3rd of April to the 9th of April - can’t believe we’ve come one-third into April and none of my TO-DOs is off the list :( A fairly productive week, learnt about stackers and ensembles, and even built a scratchy dysfunctional one!

It’s been two months since i’ve been working on the Renthop Challenge on Kaggle, and i’m slightly embarassed at how i haven’t made progress over the last 3-4 weeks. i’ve tried a lot of feature engineering, now with just 20 days left i’m focussing on building a good model – I got xgboost running, finally! Realized there was a stupid bug in my earlier xgb setup (the targets were getting mismatched to the rows). Realized ensembling is extremely useful, a simple average of my gbm and xgboost helped me 100 positions up on the leaderboard. Still lingering around the 50 percentile though :(

I read upon stacker models, and built a small two-fold xgb stacker. The thought process is, you stack a model over other diverse models, which is basically adding features(from different models) – this should ideally boost my score drastically. The logic looks sound(to me, lol), but it’s not performing well, will look into it!

At my internship, i’m still working on the Shiny app, but it’s been bottlenecked by testing and data validation. Plan to ship it by end of month. The loose strings are tightened though! Also, planning to start “brown bag sessions” at work, a new program to be initiated by interns – exciting :)

I’m making a conscious effort at building a reading habit, 30-45 minutes everyday. The stack of books on my table keeps growing, gotta pop some off! Meditation has taken a backseat in the past couple of weeks, will take it up soon. Building habits is fun, your will power is tested :)

This weekend, i went out for a couple of short 1km runs – testing my knee recovery. Better than before, but need more rest. Even registered for the Satara Half Marathon in September – Five months to go, should be fine by then. Hopeful!

Earlier yesterday, i watched India rout Uzbekistan in the Davis Cup tie, here in Bangalore. It was a good experience, witnessed some quality tennis. The circuit is tough, it’s visible in the players’ emotions. Anyways :)

That’s it folks. Later!

To those new around here, i put out a weekly blog on my progress(in life!). #DocumentingTheJourney

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