Machine learning isn't Kaggle competitions
I write about strace and kernel programming on this blog, but at work I actually mostly work on machine learning, and it’s about time I started writing about it! Disclaimer: I work on a data analysis / engineering team at a tech company, so that’s where I’m coming from.
When I started trying to get better at machine learning, I went to Kaggle (a site where you compete to solve machine learning problems) and tried out one of the classification problems. I used an out-of-the-box algorithm, messed around a bit, and definitely did not make the leaderboard. I felt sad and demoralized – what if I was really bad at this and never got to do math at work?! I still don’t think I could win a Kaggle competition. But I have a job where I do (among other things) machine learning! What gives?
To back up from Kaggle for a second, let’s imagine that you have an awesome startup idea. You’re going to predict flight arrival times for people! There are a ton of decisions you’ll need to make before you even start thinking about support vector machines:
