Quan Sun on finishing in second place in Predict Grant Applications

I’m a PhD student of the Machine Learning Group in the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. I’m also a part-time software developer for 11ants analytics. My PhD research focuses on meta-learning and the full model selection problem. In 2009 and 2010, I participated the UCSD/FICO data mining contests. What I tried and What ended up working I tried many different algorithms (mainly weka and matlab implementations) and feature sets in nearly 80 submissions. This report will briefly introduce two approaches that worked for this competition. Each of them will be discussed sequentially in the order of submissions. After the first 10 testing submissions, I realised that there was a concept drift happening between 2007 and 2008. The success rates decline gradually from 2007. Also, on the