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Comment by myth_drannon | Hacker News Reader

On Kaggle "The top 21 performers all have an M.S. or higher: 9 have Ph.D.s and several have multiple degrees (including one member who has two Ph.D.s)."

http://plotting-success.softwareadvice.com/who-are-the-kaggl...

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I've done pretty well at Kaggle with just a Bachelors in American History: http://www.kaggle.com/users/19518/vik-paruchuri, although I haven't been using it as much lately. A lot of competition winners have lacked advanced degrees. What I like most about Kaggle is that the only thing that matters is what you can show. I learned a lot, and I highly recommend it to anyone starting out in machine learning. I expanded on some of this stuff in a Quora answer if you are interested: http://www.quora.com/Kaggle/Does-everyone-have-the-ability-t....

Man..

To other readers, follow that link at your own risk. Vikp has a blog[1] which has hours and hours of excellent writing about machine learning.

[1] http://vikparuchuri.com/blog/

Thanks, nl! Now I know that at least one person reads it.

Count me as 2. Though I am sure there are lots of people who will be reading the material on your blog. Pretty good stuff.

While this may be true that doesn't by any means imply that someone with "only" a B.Sc. in Computer Science can't understand and use machine learning. In fact the only thing this implies is that those who have focused the most in the field are performing the best in competitions. Fairly standard wouldn't you say? The result shouldn't discourage anyone.

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