My Kaggle Competition Strategy: From Bronze to Gold

Week 1: Foundation

1. EDA (2 days): Distribution analysis, missing values, target leakage check
2. Baseline (1 day): Simple model, establish CV score
3. Reproducibility (1 day): Fix seeds, set up CV pipeline

Week 2-3: Feature Engineering

Work in sprints of 2-3 features, commit only if CV improves:

• Start with domain-obvious features
• Add aggregations by key entity columns
• Extract date/time parts
• Compute pairwise interactions

Week 4: Ensemble

1. Train 5-10 diverse base models
2. Hold out 20% as ensemble validation set
3. Use simple Optuna-tuned weighted average
4. Stacking only if you have time for proper CV

Last 3 Days: Final Push

• Submit 3-4 ensemble variants
• Select final based on CV+LB balance
• Don't overfit to leaderboard (keep 2 submissions in reserve)