What is a good solution to an analytics competition?

It is important to stress from the start that one good solution for an analytics competition is not necessarily a complete exploratory data analysis. From experience with several analytics competitions and looking to the highest ranked solutions, sometime is quite the opposite. Criteria for scoring a solution of an analytics competition are changing in time, but some are repeatedly adopted. The evaluators will frequently look to the originality of the approach, to the composition and to the documentation. To obtain high scores on all these criteria, the authors will have to prepare very well. An extended exploration of the data is still necessary, so that all results presented can be well documented. While useful for the research, this approach doesn’t need to be fully included in the narrative of the solution Notebook. Actually, the author could select and discuss, in his story, a small part of the data, as long as the narrative...