During the month of September, we had the pleasure to host the first Kaggle Days meetup (KDM) events in Porto. Kaggle Days Meetups are a series of events all over the world that gathers people interested in Kaggle’s Data Science competitions. On September 10th we had our first KDM Porto, followed by a 3 weeks Kaggle competition, and a second event on October 1st. The goal of the event was to foster the interest of the Data Science community in Portugal in competitive data science, as well as to increase the expertise of the community in practical problem-solving for Data Science.

DSPT partnered with Talkdesk to create a challenge with real world data and applications. This competition was designed for anyone with different levels of expertise in Data Science. From curious and beginners willing to learn about Kaggle tips and tricks to more experienced Kagglers to fine tune their skills in order to become a Kaggle Grandmaster.

During the First Day, participants were presented with the challenge proposed by Talkdesk. Being the problem and the dataset defined and posteriorly discussed with the audience. In the second part of the event, we had the talk “Tips and tricks in Kaggle useful in real world” from Jose Antonio Guerreiro,  helping the participants during the competition.

Then the 3 week competition started! The challenge was a time series, given two years data about a call center agents count the participants were asked to predict this variable to the next month. Some participants decided to go solo, others partnered up from the start, and some formed teams during the event. Throughout these weeks there were several hundred submissions in the Kaggle platform and dozens of posts/questions in the discussion channel (DSPT slack channel). In the end around 30 participants, from more than 15 teams, had made a submission in the platform. 

During the second day of the event, the winners were revealed and asked to present their solution to the public. In third place, Team Mayonnaise.

In Second place, Team EZ. 

And in the first place, Team Devscope.

Later, an amazing debate between the winners took place where participants were able to question and discuss the winning strategies.

In the aftermath of the event we asked Daniel Ferrari from Talkdesk to give us his opinion on this competition: “…  the teams made several questions bringing up new insights to be used to solve the problem. The top three best solutions proved that there is more than one way to solve the problem, and a human touch may be necessary on the first trails. Overall, it was an excellent experience that Talkdesk hopes to repeat in the future.”

We would like to thank Talkdesk for being an amazing partner in this event, sharing their real-world data making this event interesting and appealing. We would also like to acknowledge Kaggle Days Meetup, Logic.ai, Jose Antonio Guerreiro and the DSPT Porto team that made this event possible.

And of course, no DSPT meetup would be complete without our group photo.

Day 1

Day 2

Interesting links and contents related to the meetup.