Machine learning in a hurry: what I've learned from the SLICED ML competition

This summer I’ve been competing in the SLICED machine learning competition, where contestants have two hours to open a new dataset, build a predictive model, and be scored as a Kaggle submission. Contestants are graded primarily on model performance, but also get points for visualization and storytelling, and from audience votes. Before SLICED I had almost no experience with competitive ML, so I learned a lot!

For four of the SLICED episodes (including the two weeks I was competing) I shared a …