Restart on Kaggle, getting hands-on at work and putting in the runs! | Weekly Report 49

07 Aug 2017 . category: report . Comments
#kaggle #data science #fitness #myntra #bangalore #vlog

My weekly report from the 30th of July to the 6th of August – am improved week in terms of productivity, still not there though. Just a matter of time :) I’m pretty worked up about missing last week’s blog, this had not happened in quite a while, shouldn’t happen again.

I’d taken up the Instacart challenge meanwhile, but i felt a little overwhelmed by the amount of initial data preprocessing/domain understanding required. Unconsciously, this project has moved to the graveyard of unfinished starts :(

Anyway, i’m currently pulling my hair at the Web Traffic Prediction challenge on Kaggle, a very interesting high-scale time-series problem! Given previous visit counts on Wikipedia pages, the objective is to predict visits for the coming months – i’m currently focussing on building a work-around ML approach towards a time-series problem. A major problem in this approach is the lack of rolling averages for the testing dataset, will have to generate some proxies. I might have a go at Facebook’s forecasting tool, Prophet, apparently performing better than arima models! An interesting problem, i’m gonna dedicate the rest of August to this problem :)

I’m beginning to find a footing at work slowly, going through KTs and codebases – can get overwhelming at times. I’m tasked with a beautiful market segmentation + sorting problem, data science doesn’t get cooler, does it? Currently in the process of building a data pipeline and analysis for the next couple weeks, at least. Getting a hang of the Java codebase, it’s not as bad!

Marathon training has been going great, the morning runs are helping build a good day-schedule too! I’m also cycling 15 odd kilometers everyday, to and from work, gotta strengthen the knees :) Went for an odd swim in the pool, gotta get more regular at that. Failing at my workouts, should be my main focus in the pre-marathon weeks. Overall, happy with my efforts though.

The convo trip to Pilani was bliss, had fun catching up with everyone! It feels as though time doesn’t move when you’re in Pilani, and yet four years have flown by. Life is a contradiction :)

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