{
  "id": 3804,
  "title": "Is it OK to discuss solutions in the forum before it ends?",
  "url": "/competitions/event-recommendation-engine-challenge/discussion/3804",
  "author_name": "",
  "post_date": "2013-02-10T12:37:11.073Z",
  "votes": 1,
  "comment_count": 7,
  "views": 4141,
  "content": "<p>I am taking Kaggle competitions mainly because they are fun to play in spare time. But usually I don't have the time to make it to the end. So I am wondering if it is OK to discuss our solutions before competitions end - this may give other participants\r\n some isights to make their own solutions even better.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I have read the rules under the section &quot;It's OK to share code or data if made available to all players, such as on the forums.<span>&quot;. But I am not sure if it is OK to do so in the middle of a competition. I will appreciate it if someone (probably from\r\n Kaggle) can explain a little bit more on this.</span></p>\r\n<p><span>Thanks!</span></p>",
  "messages": [
    {
      "id": "20264",
      "postDate": "02/10/2013 12:37:11",
      "content": "<p>I am taking Kaggle competitions mainly because they are fun to play in spare time. But usually I don't have the time to make it to the end. So I am wondering if it is OK to discuss our solutions before competitions end - this may give other participants\r\n some isights to make their own solutions even better.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I have read the rules under the section &quot;It's OK to share code or data if made available to all players, such as on the forums.<span>&quot;. But I am not sure if it is OK to do so in the middle of a competition. I will appreciate it if someone (probably from\r\n Kaggle) can explain a little bit more on this.</span></p>\r\n<p><span>Thanks!</span></p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "20274",
      "postDate": "02/10/2013 17:48:39",
      "content": "<p>Yes. It's OK.</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "20284",
      "postDate": "02/10/2013 23:58:55",
      "content": "<p>Thanks&nbsp;<a class=\"x_x_profilelink\" title=\"View Hrishikesh Huilgolkar's profile\" href=\"http://www.kaggle.com/users/37276/hrishikesh-huilgolkar\">Hrishikesh Huilgolkar</a>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So this is my solution so far. &nbsp;Be warned it could be a spoiler. I hope someone find it useful.&nbsp;Even better, if someone can play with it and point to me how to improve it further, pretty much like what we do in\r\n<a href=\"http://codereview.stackexchange.com/\">code review</a>. : ) Good luck and have fun.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>http://datathinking.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/event-recommendation-engine-challenge-kaggle/</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "20299",
      "postDate": "02/11/2013 04:16:38",
      "content": "<p>Nice! Watch out my blog too at http://blogicious.com I will publish my solution soon.</p>\r\n<p>Its not as good as yours.. but whatever works :)&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "20350",
      "postDate": "02/12/2013 04:19:36",
      "content": "<p>Hi Dolaameng,</p>\r\n<p>How important did you find the community feature to be in your models? I have a similar feature set / target function but can't seem to get above 0.65.</p>\r\n<p>Cheers.</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "20353",
      "postDate": "02/12/2013 05:23:42",
      "content": "<p>Hi Saeh,</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;I have tried different feature ranking methods for this problem. Among them, randomForest consistenly ranked the &quot;community&quot; feature as important, along with others such as &quot;notification_ahead_hours&quot;, &quot;invited&quot; and &quot;event_topic&quot;. A glm model gave different\r\n preferences of those features because it is known to be more sensitive to the correlations among features, but again &quot;community&quot; can be found in its top feature list. &nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I have also tried to cluster users based on other ideas, such as by their locale, gender, events_of_interest and friendships, but it turns out that those clustering results are either to expensive to compute or not performing as well as the one based on\r\n community detection. I had to limit the numbers of clusters for users/events within 32, since I was using randomForest package in R.</p>\r\n<p>My experience was that picking a good target function can go a long way. And since that information is not directly available in the training set directly, my strategy was basicly trial-and-error.</p>\r\n<p>Good luck!</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "20434",
      "postDate": "02/13/2013 18:33:06",
      "content": "<p>Here's a free tip - if you haven't filtered the duplicated rows, do so now. It improve my score quite a bit, and I was stupid to ignore them till the &quot;last day&quot;.</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "20516",
      "postDate": "02/16/2013 07:07:29",
      "content": "<p>FWIW, here is my solution:</p>\r\n<p>http://sujitpal.blogspot.com/2013/02/my-solution-to-kaggle-event.html</p>\r\n<p>I'm trying to get some experience doing this, would appreciate pointers on how to improve if possible. Doesn't have to be before the challenge ends though, I am probably not going to try and improve the solution for the challenge.</p>\r\n<p>Thanks,</p>\r\n<p>Sujit</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    }
  ],
  "comments": [
    {
      "id": 20274,
      "author_name": "",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "02/10/2013 17:48:39",
      "content": "<p>Yes. It's OK.</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    },
    {
      "id": 20284,
      "author_name": "truedolaameng",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "02/10/2013 23:58:55",
      "content": "<p>Thanks&nbsp;<a class=\"x_x_profilelink\" title=\"View Hrishikesh Huilgolkar's profile\" href=\"http://www.kaggle.com/users/37276/hrishikesh-huilgolkar\">Hrishikesh Huilgolkar</a>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So this is my solution so far. &nbsp;Be warned it could be a spoiler. I hope someone find it useful.&nbsp;Even better, if someone can play with it and point to me how to improve it further, pretty much like what we do in\r\n<a href=\"http://codereview.stackexchange.com/\">code review</a>. : ) Good luck and have fun.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>http://datathinking.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/event-recommendation-engine-challenge-kaggle/</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    },
    {
      "id": 20299,
      "author_name": "",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "02/11/2013 04:16:38",
      "content": "<p>Nice! Watch out my blog too at http://blogicious.com I will publish my solution soon.</p>\r\n<p>Its not as good as yours.. but whatever works :)&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    },
    {
      "id": 20350,
      "author_name": "thomasatkins",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "02/12/2013 04:19:36",
      "content": "<p>Hi Dolaameng,</p>\r\n<p>How important did you find the community feature to be in your models? I have a similar feature set / target function but can't seem to get above 0.65.</p>\r\n<p>Cheers.</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    },
    {
      "id": 20353,
      "author_name": "truedolaameng",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "02/12/2013 05:23:42",
      "content": "<p>Hi Saeh,</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;I have tried different feature ranking methods for this problem. Among them, randomForest consistenly ranked the &quot;community&quot; feature as important, along with others such as &quot;notification_ahead_hours&quot;, &quot;invited&quot; and &quot;event_topic&quot;. A glm model gave different\r\n preferences of those features because it is known to be more sensitive to the correlations among features, but again &quot;community&quot; can be found in its top feature list. &nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I have also tried to cluster users based on other ideas, such as by their locale, gender, events_of_interest and friendships, but it turns out that those clustering results are either to expensive to compute or not performing as well as the one based on\r\n community detection. I had to limit the numbers of clusters for users/events within 32, since I was using randomForest package in R.</p>\r\n<p>My experience was that picking a good target function can go a long way. And since that information is not directly available in the training set directly, my strategy was basicly trial-and-error.</p>\r\n<p>Good luck!</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    },
    {
      "id": 20434,
      "author_name": "roulinir",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "02/13/2013 18:33:06",
      "content": "<p>Here's a free tip - if you haven't filtered the duplicated rows, do so now. It improve my score quite a bit, and I was stupid to ignore them till the &quot;last day&quot;.</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    },
    {
      "id": 20516,
      "author_name": "sujitpal",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "02/16/2013 07:07:29",
      "content": "<p>FWIW, here is my solution:</p>\r\n<p>http://sujitpal.blogspot.com/2013/02/my-solution-to-kaggle-event.html</p>\r\n<p>I'm trying to get some experience doing this, would appreciate pointers on how to improve if possible. Doesn't have to be before the challenge ends though, I am probably not going to try and improve the solution for the challenge.</p>\r\n<p>Thanks,</p>\r\n<p>Sujit</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    }
  ],
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