Winning at Competitive ML in 2021

An analysis of over 100 Machine Learning competition winners in 2020

13 Apr, 2021

What does it take to win at competitive ML?

You might be hoping to win a machine learning competition in 2021. If so, this issue will tell you just what you need to know! We collaborated with Eniola Olaleye, ranked #5 on Zindi, to look at what winners do.

Together we analysed winners using the ML Contests database of over 100 competitions that took place in 2020 across Kaggle, DrivenData, AICrowd, Zindi, and 20 other platforms. Wherever the information was available, we categorised winners to figure out what made them win. 

Some highlights:

For the full in-depth analysis as well as a few case studies, see Eniola’s article over on our new ML Insights Medium publication. Then go forth and use your newfound knowledge on one of the 11 competitions that are currently open!

Note: we weren’t able to find all the information for each of the competition winners, so the various stats and charts represent different subsets of the data.

*the original version of this post incorrectly stated that “Over 80% of the people who won competitions were first-time winners”.