This document discusses using XGBoost for a machine learning competition called JSAI Cup 2017. It provides details on:
- Using XGBoost to predict transportation demand using historical data from 500km of roads in Japan from 2012-2013.
- Preprocessing the data, which included one-hot encoding of categorical features and splitting the data into 5 periods.
- Training XGBoost models and evaluating their performance on the test data, achieving a log loss score of 0.1985 using default parameters and 0.1922 after additional hyperparameter tuning.
- The top 20 predictions made by the best XGBoost model, with performance increasing compared to benchmark methods.