kaggle

XGBoost is a fantastic open source implementation of Gradient Boosting Machines, one of the most accurate general purpose supervised learning algorithms. With interfaces from both R and Python among others, it has become a favorite tool in Kaggle competitions, and it’s also widely used in real-world applications. In this meetup we’ll have a talk from the best person on the topic,Tianqi Chen, main author of XGBoost.

If you’ve never heard of kaggle, I guess the first question I have to ask is “how did you end up on DataScience.LA?” :) Kaggle is one of the foremost machine learning competition websites on the internet. Companies from GE to Criteo and everything in between create competitions. These competitions are in the form of a dataset, ranging from small to relatively large (up to many many gigabytes), a stated goal (such as predicting an event or finding a numeric value) and an evaluation criteria. The Kaggle community has grown in the last few years, so that now competitions often host thousands of participants!