Your Year on Kaggle: Most Memorable Community Stats from 2016

Happy New Year to all 765,000 of you [View this email in your browser] Hello! As we enter a new year, we want to share and celebrate some of your 2016 highlights in the best way we know how: through numbers. There are major machine learning trends, impressive achievements, and fun factoids that all add up to one amazing community. Enjoy! Cheers, The Kaggle Team Community Kaggle wouldn't be Kaggle without you. And in 2016 we welcomed well over 300,000 new users to our community from all over the world. Walter Reade (inversion) became the world's first #1 Grandmaster in Discussions under our new progression system. [He shares his journey to the top »] This is the highest tf-idf calculated from the words in our Twitter followers' bios. What's the word, you ask? Hint: it's not "#bigdata". The word is analytics. The one-millionth Kaggler is currently projected to register on September 9th, 2017. In other words, that special moment will happen at 1504915200 in Unix epoch time. We applaud the eighty-eight Kagglers who've achieved Grandmaster status in Competitions plus one Kernel Master, [ZFTurbo]. And conversation was good in 2016: nearly 50,000 discussion posts were shared including remembrances of the life and accomplishments of Lucas (Leustagos), [a data science hero] and [#1 Kaggler]. Competitions XGBoost dominated discussion of ML techniques in 2016. But Keras is ending the year strong! Already piquing community interest, how will newcomer LightGBM do in 2017? Kagglers broke new participation records in 2016. Over 5,500 competitors accepted the challenge to improve [Santander's Customer Satisfaction]. "Trust the numbers, trust the data." Our own Amanda Schierz ([Bluefool]) got major props for her March ML Mania predictions in a 5:02 minute [video by FiveThirtyEight »] We saw 1.92 times more Kaggle InClass competitions launched by professors in 2016 compared to last year. 21,304 high fives to the students who made a submission! This year over 60,000 Kagglers competed for $1.1M in prizes, jobs, and knowledge. Thirty-nine winning teams [shared their approaches] on No Free Hunch and 154,986 submissions were made to the Titanic Getting Started competition alone. Plus, the future of competitions is bright: we launched our [first Code Competition] in December. Kernels & Datasets R used to be the language of choice on Kaggle, but 2016 has seen Python emerge as a clear winner. Will Python maintain its constrictive grip in the coming year? Our open data platform isn't quite like the Billboard 200. But if it were, the dataset [How ISIS Uses Twitter] would be a top-10 chart-topper for an impressive 31 weeks. Kagglers have published seven Pokémon-related datasets which together claim nearly 9,000 downloads. [Gotta download 'em all! »] Kagglers upvoted one another's kernels 31,091 times and 12.8% of these kernels received 10+ upvotes. Way to go! Read about some of our favorites [here »] When it came to open datasets published in 2016, sports and games were the clear winners. From the [European Soccer Database] with its 326 kernels to [20 Years of Games from IGN], the numbers make us look forward to a fantastic, data-filled 2017. Copyright © 2016 Kaggle, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you are a Kaggle user, or you are on Kaggle's mailing list. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences] or [unsubscribe from this list]