International alternatives to Kaggle for Data Science / Machine Learning competitions
While Kaggle might be the most well-known, go-to data science competition platform to test your skills at model building and performance, additional regional platforms are available around the world that offer even more opportunities to learn... and win.
By Frederik Bussler, Growth at Apteo.
By author.
We’ve all heard of Kaggle, but that also means there’s more competition — recently, Kaggle reached 5 million users. Further, not all competitions are open to everyone in the world. Here’s the policy of one competition, for instance:
“Members of the Kaggle community who are not United States Citizens or legal permanent residents at the time of entry are allowed to participate in the Competition but are not eligible to win prizes. If a team has one or more members who are not prize eligible, then the entire team is not prize eligible.”
By trying out other competition platforms, you can be a “big fish in a small pond,” as there are a lot fewer competitors.
Keep in mind that AI competitions aren’t the end-all-be-all if you want to enter the industry, as you’ll need knowledge in statistics, computing, communication, and more — not just knowing how to build models.
Besides ranking in competitions, you’ll want to work on practical projects that you can share with the world. Ideally, your projects can resonate with non-technical audiences as well, such as hiring managers who often don’t understand the intricacies of the field. To do so, you can use no-code analytics tools like Apteo that let you share very simple and easy-to-understand analyses.
That being said, let’s dive in.
1. DrivenData
DrivenData is open to everyone around the world (with the exception of OFAC sanctioned countries like Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria).
DrivenData Eligibility rules. Captured by author.
Current competitions include Alzheimer’s research, hateful meme detection, predicting flu vaccines, and more.
2. CROWDANALYTIX
CROWDANALYTIX features competitions like cement quality forecasting, with participants from around the world. Currently, competitions are slowing down, but there’s also a great blog to learn more about data science topics in the meantime.
Check out Damian Boh’s experience working on a CrowdANALYTIX competition: How I Won Top Five in a Deep Learning Competition
3. Signate
Photo by Louie Martinez on Unsplash.
Signate is basically Japan’s Kaggle and has current competitions about vehicle driving image recognition, flattening the curve, and more.
4. Zindi
Zindi is a pan-African data science competition platform with challenges including African language NLP, insurance recommendations, a mental health chatbot, and more.
GIZ AI4D Africa Language Challenge - Round 2
5. Alibaba Cloud Tianchi
Alibaba’s Tianchi platform boasts 400,000 data scientists on its platform, working on challenges like image-based 3D shape retrieval, 3D object reconstruction, and instance segmentation.
6. Analytics Vidhya
Analytics Vidhya, besides being a great data science resource, is India’s go-to data science competition platform, with current challenges including loan prediction, sales prediction, times series forecasting, recommendation engines, and more.
7. CodaLab
CodaLab is a French-based data science competition platform popular in Europe, created as a joint venture between Microsoft and Stanford University in 2013.
Today, CodaLab boasts 40,000 users and 1,000 competitions, including an on-going robotics vision challenge.
Conclusion
You can’t win Kaggle prizes as a non-American, but there are fortunately many regional alternatives available.
While we didn’t cover regions like South or Central America — which don’t have their own local platforms — you can use truly open-access sites like DrivenData no matter where you are.
Original. Reposted with permission.
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