Methodology for Training Data Science Skills Based on Competitions on the Kaggle Platform

The article describes the experience of teaching students of Big Data analytics-related fields the basics of data science. The teaching methodology used at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation is given, which consists in involvement of students of the group to competitions on Google Kaggle platform. In this methodology, the positive factors influencing the rapid acquisition of initial data science skills are: competitive effect; availability of prepared datasets and problem formulations from the real business sector in various directions; possibility of instant verification of the found solution; practical unlimited number of solutions. These factors contribute to the rapid understanding by students of the need to understand the essence of the problem for the best results, obligatory familiarization with the data, data cleaning and formatting, exploratory data analysis, forming a model with some basic level and its improvement, as well as interpretation.