petfinder

Kaggle PetFinder Competition: Deep Learning Machine Learning For Puppies (7th place solution)

Presentations and analysis of the solution

PetFinder.my has been Malaysia’s leading animal welfare platform since 2008, building in the meantime a rich database of more than 150,000 animals, complete with their history and photos. Recently, it held a competition on Kaggle, requiring participants to develop algorithms to predict the adoptability of pets - specifically, how quickly a pet will be adopted. The problem mixed tabular data, textual information, and varied images, requiring finding an optimal mix of preprocessing and learning techniques to achieve a performing result. Our team, comprising 3 Kaggle masters and 3 Kaggle experts from three different countries, achieved the 8th rank in the competition and thereafter open-sourced our solution. In the talk, we illustrate the organizational and technical challenges (with their solutions) we faced to achieve such a result.