Fail Better, Then Finish 21st

Every March, data scientists and sports fans collide on Kaggle. This year, I came out ahead of 3,464 of them. 21st place out of 3,485 entries. Top 1%. I'll take it. This is how I did it. Why Am I Even Doing This? I have an MS in Mathematics, way before some hipster decided to rename "statistics" as "data science". I spent the better part of a decade as a database administrator before deciding I…