Getting in shape for the sport of data science

Jeremy Howard (http://jhoward.fastmail.fm/) founded FastMail.FM (http://www.fastmail.fm/) (sold to Opera software in 2010) and Optimal Decisions Group (http://www.lexisnexis.com/risk/solutions/optimal-decisions-toolkit.aspx) (sold to Choicepoint/LexisNexis in 2008). After selling FastMail, he became interested in data mining competitions, and entered some of the competitions at Kaggle (http://www.kaggle.com/), where he has had a number of good results, including:

Tourism time-series forecasting (team with Lee Baker): Winner University grant prediction: Winner Chess ratings: 2nd place IJCNN social network challenge: 4th place Jeremy liked Kaggle so much, he joined the company! He is now Kaggle's Chief Data Scientist. (Kaggle is the company running the $3m Heritage Health Prize (http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/).)

In this talk, Jeremy will provides tips on how to successfully compete, and show how he combines R with other tools to build predictive models. He will provide a walkthrough of the data, visualizations, and code, for a number of his competition entries.

The talk will also include an introduction to the theory behind Jeremy's favorite modelling algorithm: random forests (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_forest). He guarantees that by the end of the talk everybody, regardless of their technical background, will understand exactly how random forests work!