The Infamous Kaggle Titanic Challenge
THE CHALLENGE The sinking of the Titanic is one of the most infamous shipwrecks in history.
On April 15, 1912, during her maiden voyage, the widely considered “unsinkable” RMS Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone onboard, resulting in the death of 1502 out of 2224 passengers and crew.
While there was some element of luck involved in surviving, it seems some groups of people were more likely to survive than others.
In this challenge, we ask you to build a predictive model that answers the question: “what sorts of people were more likely to survive?” using passenger data (ie name, age, gender, socio-economic class, etc).
OVERVIEW
The data has been split into two groups:
training set (train.csv) test set (test.csv) The training set should be used to build your machine learning models. For the training set, we provide the outcome (also known as the “ground truth”) for each passenger. Your model will be based on “features” like passengers’ gender and class. You can also use feature engineering to create new features.
The test set should be used to see how well your model performs on unseen data. For the test set, we do not provide the ground truth for each passenger. It is your job to predict these outcomes. For each passenger in the test set, use the model you trained to predict whether or not they survived the sinking of the Titanic.
We also include gender_submission.csv, a set of predictions that assume all and only female passengers survive, as an example of what a submission file should look like.
DATA DICTIONARY
Variable Definition Key survival Survival 0 = No, 1 = Yes pclass Ticket class 1 = 1st, 2 = 2nd, 3 = 3rd sex Sex Age Age in years sibsp # of siblings / spouses aboard the Titanic parch # of parents / children aboard the Titanic ticket Ticket number fare Passenger fare cabin Cabin number embarked Port of Embarkation C = Cherbourg, Q = Queenstown, S = Southampton
VARIABLE NOTES
pclass: A proxy for socio-economic status (SES) 1st = Upper 2nd = Middle 3rd = Lower
age: Age is fractional if less than 1. If the age is estimated, is it in the form of xx.5
sibsp: The dataset defines family relations in this way... Sibling = brother, sister, stepbrother, stepsister Spouse = husband, wife (mistresses and fiancés were ignored)
parch: The dataset defines family relations in this way... Parent = mother, father Child = daughter, son, stepdaughter, stepson Some children travelled only with a nanny, therefore parch=0 for them.