Getting and Looking at the Dataset

Predicting survival on the Titanic

The sinking of the Titanic is one of the most infamous shipwrecks in history.

On April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg. Considered unsinkable, there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone on board. As a result, 1,502 out of 2,224 passengers and crew members died that night.

Of course, the 722 survivors must have had some luck. But it seems as if certain groups of people had better chances to survive than others. Therefore, the Titanic sinking has also become a famous starting point for anyone interested in machine learning.

If you have some experience with machine learning, you’ll probably know about the legendary Titanic ML competition provided by Kaggle.

If you don’t know Kaggle yet, Kaggle is among the world’s largest data science communities. It offers many exciting datasets and is an excellent place to get started.

The problem to be solved is simple. We have to use machine learning to create a model that, given the passenger data, predicts which passengers survived the Titanic shipwreck.