Welcome to the third and final installment of our University Club winner interviews! This week the spotlight is on a top-scoring university team, TEAM-EDA from Hanyang University in Korea!
Today’s university students are tomorrow’s leading data scientists. That's the catalyst for Kaggle University Club — a virtual community and Slack channel for existing data science clubs who want to compete in Kaggle competitions together. As our end-of-year event for 2018, we hosted our first-ever University Hackathon.
18 total kernels were submitted and the three top-scoring teams won exclusive Kaggle swag and an opportunity to be featured here, on No Free Hunch. TEAM-EDA was one of those top teams.
To read more about the Hackathon and its grading criteria, see Winter ‘18 Hackathon. To read TEAM-EDA's winning kernel, visit Recommending Medicine by Review.
MEET THE STUDENTS
Hyunwoo Kim
Major: Industrial Engineering
Hometown: Bucheon, Korea
Anticipated graduation: 2020
What brought you to data science?
I took a data mining course and the professor hosted a classification challenge across 10 teams. Our team applied various models like SVM, NN, RF and K-NN. The professor of the course released the score at the last presentation, and we got the best score. I’ve never forgotten this moment, and this brought me to data science.
What are your career aspirations?
I’m interested in general analysis, not necessarily in a specific field. I would also like to work with tabular data. I also aspire to be a competition grandmaster in Kaggle.
Jiye Lee
Major: Financial management
Hometown: Seoul, Korea
Anticipated graduation: 2019
What brought you to data science?
I'm interested in the process of identifying and interpreting the meaning of the data. So, I worked on various data science projects as much as possible.
What are your career aspirations?
Because my major is finance, I would like to analyze data related to finance.
Sumin Song
Major: Financial management
Hometown: Masan, Korea
Anticipated graduation: 2020
What brought you to data science?
I became interested in data analysis as I learned statistics through R programming in college. I think it’s attractive to be able to verify my ideas or hypotheses empirically through data.
Career aspirations:
Although I haven’t decided yet, I want to be a data scientist in financial fields such as risk management and so on.
Juyeon Park
Major: Business administration
Hometown: Seoul, Korea
Anticipated graduation: 2019
What brought you to data science?
At first, I just liked coding because I could realize my thoughts through it. In particular, the process of refining data and obtaining insights gives me pleasure. I also found it helpful to be able to apply statistics in business administration.
Career aspirations?
It was my dream to become a data scientist in the insurance business. This month, I realized that dream! So my future goal is to improve understanding of insurance through work and become a NLP specialist.
Eunjoo Min
Major: Financial Management
Hometown: Seoul, Korea
Anticipated graduation date: 2019
What brought you to data science?
I’ve been interested in statistics since I was a high school student and took lectures about statistics and computer science as I started studying in my uni. I started becoming interested in data analysis thanks to these lectures and since then I’ve been participating in various projects
Career aspirations:
Data scientist, specialized in natural language processing or structured data.
TEAM QUESTIONS
How familiar was your team with Kaggle competitions prior to the Hackathon?
Except for one member, this was our second competition. We competed in the House Prices: Advanced Regression challenge. Other than that, we only studied kernels and discussed finished competitions.
How did your team work together on your kernel?
We began most of the project within the kernel and wrote some of the codes in the local environment. Every member came up with ideas about how to use the data and find the most useful results. Several members were familiar with NLP before, so they focused their efforts there. Other members were experienced in deep learning and handled other areas. Based on what each expert brought back, we wrote the kernel along with data visualization. We concluded by organizing the report together.
What was the most challenging part of the hackathon for you?
Two main challenges:
1. NLP in English was quite challenging. I thought it would be easier in English (I heard Korean is harder because of its structure) but it was quite different from Korean and we had to adjust.
2. It was difficult to select the final report topic because it was so open-ended. Also, emotional analysis was difficult because we had never tried emotional analysis before.
What surprised you most about the competition?
1. We’ve previously participated in a project dealing with online reviews in E-commerce markets and never thought of the counts improving the end result. In our kernel, we showed useful counts can be helpful in checking if a review is important or agreed on by many users, which can lead us to better recommendation.
2. We were surprised to see that the prediction performance got worse than before preprocessing. (It was like a mystery to us!)
What advice would you give another student who wanted to compete in a Kaggle competition or hackathon?
I would highly recommend trying Kaggle competitions if you’re hesitant to try it. We started trying without knowing anything, and now we’ve been at it for almost a year! (Yet I have no competition medal, haha.)
You can also learn a lot by reading kernels of other participants. If you are not experienced in data science yet, kernels are such a good opportunity to learn.
Finally, Kaggle can give you the best experience in every type of data analysis. It doesn’t matter if you win or not, it’s just worth trying for the experience alone. Try as much as possible, and the prize will come to you soon!
Anything else?
We are so glad to win this hackathon, and our team will keep taking on new challenges. Thank you for giving us this amazing opportunity.
Fantastic job, team!
TEAM EDA FROM HANYANG UNIVERSITY (FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: EUNJOO MIN, SUMIN SONG, JIYE LEE, HYUNWOO KIM, JUYEONG LEE, SANGHYONG JUNG).