At the office, our CTO threw down the gauntlet and challenged the entire engineering department to compete in the “Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster” competition on Kaggle. If you haven't heard of Kaggle before, it is a gamified platform for learning and practicing machine learning. Datasets are posted with both test and training data. Your job is to build a model of some kind using the training data, make predictions about the test data, and submit those predictions. Your predictions are then scored and ranked against all other users within that dataset.

The Titanic dataset is a very, very simple…