Building a baseline model

We start our approach by building a baseline solution. The notebook running an end-to-end solution is available at:

While hopefully useful as a starting point for other competitions you might want to try, it is more educational to follow the flow described in this section, i.e. copying the code cell by cell, so that you can understand it better (and of course improve on it - it is called a baseline solution for a reason).

Figure 3.2: the imports needed for our baseline solution

We begin by importing the necessary packages - while personal differences in style are a natural thing, it is our opinion that gathering the imports in one place makes the code easier to maintain as the competition progresses and you move towards more elaborate solutions. In addition, we create a configuration class: a placeholder for all the parameters defining our learning process:

Figure 3.3: configuration class for our baseline solution

The components include:

• The data folder...