Data Science - Practice

After learning some basic data science skills via tutorials, videos, books, to sustain the knowledge one needs to practice. Practice periodically is very essential to sustain and improve on the knowledge.

Some of the key ways to practice:

1. Kaggle competition
2. Hackathons, MeetUp talks etc
3. Contract Job
4. Pet Projects - Try to relate to your current profession.

This article concentrates on the top 3 things listed above only as the 4th item is very subjective

Kaggle Competition:

Typical Iteration Cycle (Copied from a top performer):

1. Read the overview and data description of the competition carefully
2. Find similar Kaggle competitions. As a relatively new comer, I have collected and done a basic analysis of all Kaggle competitions.
3. Read solutions of similar competitions.
4. Read papers to make sure I don’t miss any progress in the field.
5. Analyze the data and build a stable CV (Cross Validation).
6. Data pre-processing, feature engineering, model training.
7. Result analysis such as prediction distribution, error analysis, hard examples.
8. Elaborate models or design a new model based on the analysis.
9. Based on data analysis and result analysis, design models to add diversities or solve hard samples.
10. Ensemble.
11. Return to a former step if necessary.

Some Key themes repeated:

1. Feature Engineering is very important (Finding new useful features)
2. Ensemble and stacking
3. Persistence and continuous learning is very important

Useful Article:

https://dnc1994.com/2016/05/rank-10-percent-in-first-kaggle-competition-en/

Hackathons:

There doesnt seem to be a lot of on-site DataScience hackathons in Singapore. Some of the online hackathons to check:

1. Analytics Vidhya
2. Devpost

(First concentrate on Kaggle and then move to Hackathons)

Getting Contract Work:

Build your online profile to build reputation. Some methods:

1. Kaggle
2. Github sharing
3. Blogging & commenting in community
4. Linkedin profile & Social Media

Initially just try the portal. Freelancing can be very challenging and very time consuming. Focus on learning first and build online presence first. Getting online jobs on web dev and App building are easier.

Some sites to try for work:

1. Upwork
2. Toptal - strict criteria to be able to get in
3. Elance
4. Freelancer >> Gives opportunity to compete in competions & prove your skill

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245953