Template Credit: Adapted from a template made available by Dr. Jason Brownlee of Machine Learning Mastery.

SUMMARY: This project aims to construct a predictive model using various machine learning algorithms and document the end-to-end steps using a template. The Kaggle Tabular Playground October 2021 dataset is a binary classification situation where we attempt to predict one of the two possible outcomes.

INTRODUCTION: Kaggle wants to provide an approachable environment for relatively new people in their data science journey. Since January 2021, they have hosted playground-style competitions on Kaggle with fun but less complex, tabular datasets. The dataset used for this competition is synthetic but based on a real dataset and generated using a CTGAN. The original dataset deals with predicting the biological response of molecules given various chemical properties. Although the features are anonymized, they have properties relating to real-world features.

ANALYSIS: The performance of the preliminary XGBoost model achieved an ROC/AUC benchmark of 0.7019. After a series of tuning trials, the refined XGBoost model processed the training dataset with a final score of 0.7867. When we applied the last model to Kaggle’s test dataset, the model achieved a ROC/AUC score of 0.7849.

CONCLUSION: In this iteration, the XGBoost model did not appear to be a suitable algorithm for modeling this dataset.

Dataset Used: Kaggle Tabular Playground 2021 October Data Set

Dataset ML Model: Binary classification with numerical and categorical attributes

Dataset Reference: https://www.kaggle.com/c/tabular-playground-series-oct-2021

One potential source of performance benchmark: https://www.kaggle.com/c/tabular-playground-series-oct-2021/leaderboard

The HTML formatted report can be found here on GitHub.