Kaggle Visualization Challenge Winner

Published: Author: Oliver Staubli, CEO & Data ScientistTags: Data Visualization,  D3.js,  C++,  HTML5,  jQuery

I'm a big fan of the Kaggle platform, one of the world's largest community of data scientists. I came across Kaggle two years ago and thought this "crowd sourcing" idea is brilliant: Companies like Netflix, Google, Facebook are able to host competitions about their hardest predictive modeling problems. The data scientists on the other hand try to solve those complex problems best possible in a given time frame. Besides fame and glory, the winner gets prize money of multiple thousand dollars.

During the past Christmas break holidays, I finally found enough time to participate in my first Kaggle competition. Actually with some success!

Leaping Leaderboard Leapfrogs Wettbewerb

The competition Leaping Leaderboard Leapfrogs was conducted by Kaggle itself, with the aim to find an improved visualization of the Kaggle leaderboards. Although it's all about the ranking in the leaderboards of the various Kaggle competitions, these were implemented so far as boring tables. The data base for this competition consisted of the various submissions of expired contests including team name, solution-score and date. They were looking for an attractive visualization which shows the fierce fighting at the top of the leaderboards.

Solution approach

In contrast to most of the other participants, I tried to "keep it simple": I have concentrated on visualizing the relative ranking positions, while others built interactive web applications to track the absolute submission scores of the teams over time. The result of my approach was a fairly simple but illustrative chart which shows the struggles of the leading teams over time.

My submitted solution on Kaggle: Battles of the Best

The Kaggle community did apparently like my submission: At the end of the voting period I gained the most votes and thus won this competition. The prize was an iPad including some cool Kaggle stickers. Thank you Kaggle!

Technical details