book

The Kaggle Book - Second Edition

Name: The Kaggle Book - Second Edition
ISBN: 9781835083208

by Luca Massaron, Bojan Tunguz, Konrad Banachewicz

December 2025

Intermediate to advanced

708 pages

18h 36m

English

Packt Publishing

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A Word from Some Kaggle Grandmasters
Preface
Who this book is forWhat this book coversTo get the most out of this bookGet in touchFree Benefits with Your BookHow to Unlock
Part 1: Your Kaggle Launchpad: Mastering the Essentials
Introducing Kaggle and Other Data Science Competitions
Free Benefits with Your BookThe rise of data science competition platformsThe Kaggle competition platformOther competition platformsIntroducing Kaggle competitionsStages of a competitionTypes of competitions and examplesSubmission and leaderboard dynamicsExplaining the Common Task Framework paradigmUnderstanding what can go wrong in a competitionComputational resourcesKaggle NotebooksTeaming and networkingPerformance tiers and rankingsCriticism and opportunitiesSummaryGet This Book’s PDF Version and Exclusive ExtrasJoin our book’s Discord space
Organizing Data with Datasets
Setting up a datasetGathering the dataWorking with datasetsUsing Kaggle datasets in Google ColabLegal caveatsSummaryJoin our book’s Discord space
Working and Learning with Kaggle Notebooks
Technical requirementsSetting up a notebookRunning your notebookSaving notebooks to GitHubSetting a notebook as a utility scriptGetting the most out of notebooks’ resourcesUpgrading to Google Cloud Platform (GCP)Going one step beyondKaggle Learn coursesSummaryGet This Book’s PDF Version and Exclusive ExtrasJoin our book’s Discord space
Kaggle Models
Selecting a Kaggle modelTaskData TypeFrameworkLanguageLicenseFine TunableSizeUsing Kaggle ModelsUploading your model to Kaggle ModelsSummaryJoin our book’s Discord space
Leveraging Discussion Forums
How Kaggle forums workSample approaches to discussionsDiscussions on common challengesInformation leakage and overfittingNetiquetteSummaryGet This Book’s PDF Version and Exclusive ExtrasJoin our book’s Discord space
Part 2: Elevating Your Game: Advanced Techniques for Competitive Success
Competition Tasks and Metrics
Evaluation metrics and objective functionsBasic types of tasksRegressionClassificationOrdinalThe Meta Kaggle datasetHandling never-before-seen metricsMetrics for regression (standard and ordinal)Mean squared error (MSE) and R squaredRMSERMSLEMAEMetrics for classification (label prediction and probability)AccuracyPrecision and recallThe F1 scoreLog lossROC-AUCMatthews correlation coefficient (MCC)Metrics for multi-class classificationMetrics for object detection and segmentation problemsIoUDiceMetrics for multi-label classification and recommendation problemsOptimizing evaluation metricsCustom metrics and custom objective functionsPost-processing your predictionsProbabilistic adjustments of the predictionsSummaryJoin our book’s Discord space

Designing Good Validation
Snooping on the leaderboardThe importance of validation in competitionsBias and varianceTrying different splitting strategiesThe basic train-test splitProbabilistic evaluation methodsk-fold cross-validationUnderstanding how k-fold cross-validation worksK-fold variationsSequential cross-validation in time seriesValidation in financial time seriesNested cross-validationProducing OOF predictionsSubsamplingThe bootstrapTuning your model validation systemUsing adversarial validationExample implementationHandling different distributions of training and test dataHandling data leakageFeature leakageLeakage at the example levelHandling data leakage in KaggleSummaryGet This Book’s PDF Version and Exclusive ExtrasJoin our book’s Discord space
Modeling for Tabular Competitions
The Tabular Playground SeriesSetting a random state for reproducibilityThe importance of EDAPerforming EDA in KaggleDimensionality reduction with t-SNE and UMAPReducing the size of your dataSpeeding up data processingApplying feature engineeringEasily derived featuresMeta-features based on rows and columnsTarget encodingUsing feature importance to evaluate your workPseudo-labelingDenoising with autoencodersAutoML for tabular competitionsNeural networks for tabular competitionsSummaryJoin our book’s Discord space
Hyperparameter Optimization
Basic optimization techniquesGrid searchRandom searchHalving searchKey parameters and how to use themLinear modelsSupport vector machinesRandom forests and extremely randomized treesGradient tree boostingLightGBMXGBoostCatBoostHistGradientBoostingBayesian optimizationUsing scikit-optimizeCustomizing a Bayesian optimization searchExtending Bayesian optimization to neural architecture searchCreating lighter and faster models with KerasTunerThe TPE approach in OptunaUsing Weights & BiasesTracking experimentsVersioning with artifactsImplementing Sweeps optimizationSummaryGet This Book’s PDF Version and Exclusive ExtrasJoin our book’s Discord space
Ensembling with Blending and Stacking Solutions
A brief introduction to ensemble algorithmsAveraging models into an ensembleMajority votingAveraging of model predictionsWeighted averagesAveraging in your cross-validation strategyCorrecting averaging for ROC-AUC evaluationsBlending models using a meta-modelBest practices for blendingStacking models togetherPerforming stackingStacking variationsCreating complex stacking and blending solutionsSummaryJoin our book’s Discord space
Modeling for Computer Vision
Augmentation strategiesKeras built-in augmentationsThe ImageDataGenerator approachPreprocessing layersA deeper dive: the albumentations packageImage classificationObject detectionSemantic segmentationExploring a capstone case study: CZII – CryoET Object Identification competitionThe key characteristics of the datasetModeling implicationsTalking about the data formatEvaluation strategy and challengesData exploration overviewA first baseline solution, the 3D U-Net segmentation approachStarting from a Kaggle baselineExamining the second-place solution: an ensemble of lightweight 3D modelsHow to perform ensembling and inferenceLooking at other top solutions and insightsOverall trends emerged in the competitionSummaryGet This Book’s PDF Version and Exclusive ExtrasJoin our book’s Discord space
Modeling for NLP
Sentiment analysisOpen domain Q&AToxic comments classificationText classification with TF-IDF and logistic regressionImporting the necessary librariesDefining the target labels and loading the datasetWord-level TF-IDF vectorizationCharacter-level TF-IDF vectorizationCombining word and character featuresTraining the logistic regression model and cross-validationCalculating the total cross-validation scoreSaving the predictions to a CSV fileText preprocessing and cleanupImporting libraries, loading files, and setting up global variablesLoading pretrained dictionariesSetting preprocessing parametersDefining contraction patternsSplitting toxic wordsTokenizing with TweetTokenizerURL replacementNormalizing by dictionaryLoading a spaCy modelThe main normalization functionReading and normalizing dataSaving the processed dataText classification with RNNsImports and environment setupLoading preprocessed dataLoading embeddingsSplitting the datasetsBuilding the Keras modelTraining and averaging multiple seedsCreating a submission fileText classification with DistilBERTSetting up the environment and dependenciesLoading and preparing the training dataCreating a custom Dataset class for multi-label classificationSplitting the data into training and validation setsInitializing the tokenizer and creating data loadersDefining the model architecturePreparing the model and optimizer for trainingTraining loopPreparing and processing the test dataInference on the test dataFormatting and saving the predictionsText classification with AutoTrainSetting up the environment and dependenciesSetting up AutoTrain parametersInitializing and creating the Autotrain projectLoading a pretrained model and tokenizerPreparing the test data for inferenceCreating a custom Dataset classRunning predictions with the trainerText classification with LLM embeddings and logistic regressionOpenAI embeddingsInitializing the OpenAI clientDefining a helper function for embeddingsLoading and cleaning the dataHandling specific data anomaliesGenerating embeddings for the dataConverting embeddings to NumPy arraysSaving the embeddings for later useNVIDIA embeddingsDefining a function to get embeddingsSetting the stage: Data and dependenciesCross-validation and trainingIterating over each targetMaking predictions and recording performancePreparing the submissionText augmentation strategiesBasic techniquesText augmentation with back-and-forth translationnlpaugSummaryJoin our book’s Discord space
Generative AI in Kaggle Competitions
Understanding generative AI and LLMsThe working of LLMsUnlocking global communication with Gemma: fine-tuning LLMs for new languagesCompetition format and dataTop solutions overviewFine-tuning Gemma in practice: exampleKey techniques used in fine-tuningLLM prompt recoveryCompetition overviewThird-place solution (team prompt = “don’t say anything”)Origins of the mean promptQuantitative outcome and qualitative lessonsAI assistants for data tasks with GemmaCompetition overviewTop solution: “PyGEM” – a Python programming chatbotSummaryGet This Book’s PDF Version and Exclusive ExtrasJoin our book’s Discord space
Simulation and Optimization Competitions
Technical requirementsWorking with Connect XRock, Paper, ScissorsSanta competition 2020A few other Kaggle game agent competitionsFIDE and the Google Efficient Chess AI ChallengeThe 4th place solution: enhancing Stockfish with a small neural networkChoosing the base engineOptimizing memory usageEnhancing the evaluation function with a neural networkCode example and repositoryBroader implicationsSummaryJoin our book’s Discord space
Part 3: Kaggle for Your Career: Building Your Profile and Finding Opportunities
Creating Your Portfolio of Projects and Ideas
Building your portfolio with KaggleThe golden rules of a good portfolioLeveraging notebooksLeveraging discussionsLeveraging datasetsArranging your online presence beyond KaggleBlogs and publicationsGitHubMaking an online demoWriting a paper on arXivMonitoring ongoing competitionsSummaryGet This Book’s PDF Version and Exclusive ExtrasJoin our book’s Discord space
Finding New Professional Opportunities
Building connections with other competition data scientistsParticipating in Kaggle Days and other Kaggle meetupsGetting spotted and other job opportunitiesHow Kaggle can helpThe STAR approachSummary (and some parting words)Join our book’s Discord space
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Index

Overview

The Kaggle Book provides readers with practical insights and strategies for succeeding in data science competitions on Kaggle, the premier platform for honing competitive data science skills. With guidance from experienced Kaggle Grandmasters, readers will acquire valuable skills in data analysis, machine learning, and competition-specific techniques to excel in real-world scenarios.

What this Book will help me do

Understand the structure of Kaggle competitions and leverage platform features like Notebooks, Datasets, and Forums.
Master foundational and advanced modeling techniques, including ensembling, feature engineering, and hyperparameter optimization.
Design effective validation schemes and work with diverse evaluation metrics to enhance the reliability of your results.
Develop expertise in tackling specific competition tasks such as image classification, natural language processing, and generative AI.
Build a portfolio of projects and skills to improve career prospects and achieve greater success in data science roles.

Author(s)

Luca Massaron, Bojan Tunguz, and Konrad Banachewicz are leading experts in data science with extensive competitive experience on Kaggle. Their collective achievements include mastering complex techniques and guiding aspiring data scientists toward success. As seasoned professionals, their approachable writing style makes complex concepts accessible and actionable, enhancing readers' learning experience.

Who is it for?

The ideal reader of The Kaggle Book is anyone interested in data science competitions, particularly those seeking to enhance their skills and expertise on Kaggle. This book is perfect for beginner to intermediate data scientists who want to improve their competitiveness in Kaggle competitions. A foundation in basic machine learning concepts is recommended to fully appreciate the material. Whether you're a working data analyst or a student aspiring for a career in machine learning and AI, this book offers the guidance you need.

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