Learn Python by Building Data Science Applications

Failed attempts

The example-based narrative of this book may mislead you into thinking that each hypothesis or idea improves accuracy. In fact, in order to write this chapter, we had to try and test a handful of other features and methods that didn't work out. For example, one idea we tried was to use the dates of each battle as a feature; you would think that allies lost more battles in the first half of the war and won more in the second. In reality, it actually lowered our performance on the testing dataset.

We also tried filling the missing values. At the very beginning of this chapter, we filled empty cells for planes, tanks, and guns with zeroes. In reality, the authors of Wikipedia had different sources; some of them had detailed data ...