Category: competition
Question: What are the different types of competitions available on Kaggle?
Answer: # Types of Competitions

Kaggle Competitions are designed to provide challenges for competitors at all different stages of their machine learning careers. As a result, they are very diverse, with a range of broad types.

## Featured

Featured competitions are the types of competitions that Kaggle is probably best known for. These are full-scale machine learning challenges which pose difficult, generally commercially-purposed prediction problems. For example, past featured competitions have included:

- [Allstate Claim Prediction Challenge](https://www.kaggle.com/c/allstate-purchase-prediction-challenge) - Use customers’ shopping history to predict which insurance policy they purchase
- [Jigsaw Toxic Comment Classification Challenge](https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-comment-classification-challenge) - Predict the existence and type of toxic comments on Wikipedia
- [Zillow Prize](https://www.kaggle.com/c/zillow-prize-1) - Build a machine learning algorithm that can challenge Zestimates, the Zillow real estate price estimation algorithm

Featured competitions attract some of the most formidable experts, and offer prize pools going as high as a million dollars. However, they remain accessible to anyone and everyone. Whether you’re an expert in the field or a complete novice, featured competitions are a valuable opportunity to learn skills and techniques from the very best in the field.

## Research

Research competitions are another common type of competition on Kaggle. Research competitions feature problems which are more experimental than featured competition problems. For example, some past research competitions have included:

- [Google Landmark Retrieval Challenge](https://www.kaggle.com/c/landmark-retrieval-challenge) - Given an image, can you find all the same landmarks in a dataset?
- [Right Whale Recognition](https://www.kaggle.com/c/noaa-right-whale-recognition) - Identify endangered right whales in aerial photographs
- [Large Scale Hierarchical Text Classification](https://www.kaggle.com/c/lshtc) - Classify Wikipedia documents into one of ~300,000 categories

Research competitions do not usually offer prizes or points due to their experimental nature. But they offer an opportunity to work on problems which may not have a clean or easy solution and which are integral to a specific domain or area in a slightly less competitive environment.

## Getting Started

Getting Started competitions are the easiest, most approachable competitions on Kaggle. These are semi-permanent competitions that are meant to be used by new users just getting their foot in the door in the field of machine learning. They offer no prizes or points. Because of their long-running nature, Getting Started competitions are perhaps the most heavily tutorialized problems in machine learning - just what a newcomer needs to get started!

- [Digit Recognizer](https://www.kaggle.com/c/digit-recognizer)
- [Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster](https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic) - Predict survival on the Titanic
- [Housing Prices: Advanced Regression Techniques](https://www.kaggle.com/c/house-prices-advanced-regression-techniques)

Getting Started competitions have two-month rolling leaderboards. Once a submission is more than two months old, it is automatically invalidated and no longer counts towards the leaderboard. Similarly, your team will drop from the leaderboard if all its submissions are older than two months. This gives new Kagglers the opportunity to see how their scores stack up against a cohort of competitors, rather than many tens of thousands of users. If your team is removed from a Getting Started competition due to the rolling expiry and wishes to rejoin, creating a new submission will cause it to show again on the leaderboard.

Additionally, the Kaggle [Learn platform](https://www.kaggle.com/learn/overview) has several tracks for beginners interested in free hands-on data science learning from pandas to deep learning. Lessons within a track are separated into easily digestible chunks and contain Notebook exercises for you to practise building models and new techniques. You’ll learn all the skills you need to dive into Kaggle Competitions.

## Playground

Playground competitions are a “for fun” type of Kaggle competition that is one step above Getting Started in difficulty. These are competitions which often provide relatively simple machine learning tasks, and are similarly targeted at newcomers or Kagglers interested in practicing a new type of problem in a lower-stakes setting. Prizes range from kudos to small cash prizes. Some examples of Playground competitions are:

- [Dogs versus Cats](https://www.kaggle.com/c/dogs-vs-cats) - Create an algorithm to distinguish dogs from cats
- [Leaf Classification](https://www.kaggle.com/c/leaf-classification) - Can you see the random forest for the leaves?
- [New York City Taxi Trip Duration](https://www.kaggle.com/c/nyc-taxi-trip-duration) - Share code and data to improve ride time predictions