Digit Recognizer

Basic Kaggle competition for recognizing digits using the MNIST ("Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology") dataset.

Competition details

Requirements

• Julia >= 3.0
  • DataFrames package
  • DecisionTree package
• iJulia
• Datasets in ./data or on the competition page

Running

Start up ipython notebook ipython notebook --profile julia and open the DigitRecognizer.ipynb notebook

Results

Using a random forest of 10 random features, 10 trees, and 0.5 portion of samples per tree builds a model of:

Ensemble of Decision Trees
Trees:      20
Avg Leaves: 3426.75
Avg Depth:  24.4

Using a 5 fold cross validation the mean accuracy for prediction the correct digit is Mean Accuracy: 0.9388095238095238

This is relatively good using a decision tree on digit recognition versus a k nearest neighbors approach which might yield better accuracy.

At time of submission this accuracy ranked #368 on the leaderboard.