Making it to the Top 4% of a Kaggle leaderboard and why I shouldn't be there
If there is only one thing I learned by doing this, is that I really don't know very much. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, here are the methods, mistakes, and lessons I learned while attempting my first ML models in R.
TLDR; I wanted to apply my beginner R skills to a complex problem, and chose machine learning because why not. I managed to do well, but my lack of knowledge blinded me to the fact that I was kinda cheating, as I relied heavily on trial and error to rise the ranks. Despite this, I learned a lot about classification models and random forests, wrote more complex R code that the beginner stuff I had done so far, and enjoyed messing around and reflecting on the experience. All in all, it’s still a…
