How Quarantine brought me into Data science and Kaggle
By: Salman Ibne Eunus
Tags: Kaggle, Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision

How Quarantine brought me into Data science and how I became a Kaggle 3x Expert.

It all started during the beginning of the lockdown when I finally had enough time to do the things I really wanted to do for a long time. I was looking for resources to learn in depth Machine Learning for my Undergrad final year research work. I also started watching videos from the Standford Machine Learning course by Andrew NG. At that time, I only had some basic idea about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. My University was also providing opportunity to do some free courses on Coursera with Certificates. I have always wanted to do some courses on Coursera, but before lockdown, it was not possible to give full attention because of studies and a lot of other stuffs going on. As soon as the lockdown started, I decided to spend most of my time watching machine learning videos on Coursera. On the other hand, I was also often distracted and spent some of my time watching other CS stuffs and tutorials.

I was experimenting with software development at the beginning and watched video tutorials of web development, Android studio, Unity, Javasrcipt, Nodejs, bootstrap, etc, but over time I shifted into data science as if pulled away by some magical force which in the end seems to connect all the dots.

One day, I came across an IBM short guide which discussed the basics of machine learning and it’s algorithms and how data science and analytics can be used in business scenarios. This guide caught my attention because I am involved with a Robotics and AI startup and I thought I might be able to implement machine learning and data science to improve the startup business. So, I went through the whole book named — “Machine Learning For Dummies” by Judith Hurwitz and Daniel Kirsch. I completed the whole guide of 75 pages within a day or two which talked about the fundamental concepts of machine learning and machine learning algorithms and gave some ideas about how it can be implemented in practical life. In the end of the book it provided the name of some of the best known online resources to learn data science and machine learning. The list included some amazing resources like — Medium: Inside Machine Learning, CognitiveClass.ai, Coursera, Udacity and ofcourse Kaggle.

I suddenly felt that the name “Kaggle” rang a bell into my mind. I remembered a year ago, I participated in an introductory machine learning workshop at Brac University where I heard this name and created an account on it without literally having any idea or knowledge about what to do with it.

So, I searched the name on Google and found my account, but still having no idea about what to do with it. At that time, I was doing another course on Coursera called — “How Google Does Machine Learning” taken by Google Cloud Training Team. This course helped me to grasp basic machine learning concepts and had less focus on coding. After completing this course I felt like I need to brush up my basic Python skills before I dive into indepth machine learning programming. So I found a bunch of courses from University of Michigan titled — ” Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python)” and “Python Data Structures” by Charles Russell Severance. These two courses really helped me to enhance my Python skills tremendously.

During the beginning of lockdown a lot of online platforms where providing some wonderful courses for free. So I did a course on introduction to R from datacamp as well. At the same time, coincidentally, I came accross the LinkedIn profile of Abhishek Thakur who was the world’s first ever Kaggle 3x Grandmaster at that time and now a 4x Grandmaster. I also came across his interview taken by Kaggle on YouTube after becoming 3x Grandmaster. I watched the whole interview and his overall story of how he achieved such a great feat inspired me a lot. This video gave me an idea about Kaggle and I started googling about how I can start my journey as a Kaggler and found that Kaggle provides some basic Kaggle courses which will guide me on how to make a quick start. This was probably the beginning of my journey into a marvelous and astounding world of data.

The first mini course I did on kaggle was an introductory machine learning course but the thing I loved about it is that it provided me the hands on knowledge of implementing basics of machine learning models like — decision trees and random forest and also provided me the idea about how I can start my journey as a kaggler. As a result, I started doing courses on Kaggle and Coursera simultaneously on machine learning and data science. My learning curve was pretty high at that time as I had nothing to do except focusing on data science. I did another course on Coursera at that time taken by University of Michigan which gave me a more broader idea about the world of data science and analytics.

I soon became comfortable with the basic machine learning ideas and turned my attention into gaining some insights about deep learning and neural networks and as always Andrew Ng was the saviour ! Neural networks and Deep Learning course from Andrew Ng gave me a concrete idea about the basics of neural networks and how neural networks can be used in computer Vision scenarios. One of the unique qualities Andrew NG possesses is being able to explain difficult concepts in a quite simple and comprehendable manner. Then I did more courses on kaggle like — Intermediate Machine learning, Data visualization, deep learning, Pandas data manipulation, etc. Over the next two months, my data science and data handling skills became more stronger than ever and I gradually started making notebooks and exploring various kaggle datasets. I also engaged myself in sharing what I was learning from coursera and other platforms with the kaggle community by creating discussion topics in the kaggle discussion forum. Therefore, after around two months I got my first series of bronze medals and became a discussion expert. I also observed and learn how other kagglers collect dataset for the community and I also luckily found some Covid-19 related dataset from the internet which provided data about the Covid-19 situation of Bangladesh. Moreover, as I was getting bronze medals for notebooks, discussions and datasets, it kept on motivating to work even harder. As a result, within a month, I became Kaggle notebook expert and became a dataset expert as well after a month or two. At that time, I was among one of the first Kaggle 3x experts in Bangladesh.

I consider this as just the beginning of my Kaggle Journey. I have still a long way to go, but the things I have achieved and learnt so far from this platform has tremendously changed my life and made myself to dream big for something even greater and magnificient. I literally fell in love with data science and I want this love and passion to stay with me throughout my life.