dataqa VS kaggle-environments

Hey, I am the creator and (only contributor today) of open-source https://github.com/dataqa/dataqa, a Python library to explore and annotate documents. It uses weak supervision, is based on spacy, and has a lot of opportunities to add more deep learning and ML functionality. I can guide you through it :-). This would be a great opportunity to be first and lead contributor of an open-source library (outside the creator).

I recently added a new feature to DataQA (https://github.com/dataqa/dataqa) to be able to extract entities from Wikipedia. All you need to do is upload a file with Wikipedia urls:

The open-source project is here: https://github.com/dataqa/dataqa. I have just released a feature which I have been working on for a while to solve a problem which I've seen a lot in industry: how to map entities found in text to large knowledge base ontologies.

The tool I developed and used for this problem: https://github.com/dataqa/dataqa

I have seen first hand at small and large companies how problems have been tackled with ML without trying a simple rule or heuristic first. And then, further down the line, the system has been compared to a few business rules put together, to find that the difference in performance did not explain the deployment of an ML system in the first place.

It's true that if your rules grow in complexity, this might make it harder to maintain, but the good thing about rules is that they tend to be fully explainable, and they can be encoded by domain experts. So the maintenance of such a system does not need to be done exclusively by an ML engineer anymore.

Here is where I insert my plug: I have developed a tool to create rules to solve NLP problems: https://github.com/dataqa/dataqa

After working in ML for more than a decade, I became frustrated over time with the lack of tools to create baselines using simple rules and heuristics. It is well known that most business problems out there can achieve decent baselines using only heuristics. This is why I have developed DataQA (https://github.com/dataqa/dataqa), which uses NLP rules to do common NLP annotation tasks, such as multiclass classification or named entity recognition.

If you are interested in Data Science, you may want to look at Kaggle competitions. https://www.kaggle.com/competitions

Secondly, if you feel like you do not have enough skills or a lack of practice answering problem statements, there are a lot of good websites where you can find interesting projects. I would recommend starting participating in some Kaggle competitions or download some free Google datasets and start playing with them.

For reference: Kaggle is a Google product. You can see the list of current competitions here.

You could try Kaggle competitions, or participating in forecasting markets (as you stated) is another option. You don't need any specific skill set to be a forecaster, the rules of the bet are stipulated and from there it's just based on your ability to predict the outcome. You could also try your hand at investing in the stock market, or try and make money betting on sports games. If you're very good at this stuff I'm sure you can make a lot of money doing it. The thing to keep in mind is that generally video games are much much easier than real life

As to the specifics of your projects, that's up to you. Try browsing Kaggle; check out some of the work we have on The Pudding; check out some journalism examples to see what you can try to build on or improve.

You might want to look at kaggle competitions.