Kaggle is a great platform that combines access to a variety of building blocks that comprises of a end-to-end Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML).
Datasets
On Kaggle a large collection of datasets are available. These datasets are of different kinds. Tabular data, Images and Text datasets are available for you to analyze and create models from. These Datasets are released by companies and also by data enthusiasts.
Competitions
Competitions on Kaggle is how this platform first gained huge popularity. There are many types of competitions. The ones that have a cash prize are sponsored by large companies who wish to learn from the best Data professionals in the world.
Imagine a company wants to solve a DSML problem. Kaggle gives them a chance to present the problem to the world and have the best DSML professionals and enthusiasts compete with each other for the final prize.
Kaggle has created a very solid talent network for Data professionals. The winners of many of these competitions go on to get top jobs in the DSML industry. Many of the winners are already top professionals and academics in DSML and seeing how they win a competition is the best kind of practical education in DSML world.
Notebooks
Notebooks are the building blocks of all DSML workflows. Students, professors and professionals all use Notebooks during research and also in production.
Notebooks are a very different approach to developing technical solutions. For DSML professionals this is a huge advantage.
In a Notebook you can write code and see the output right there. And you can break up a long problem statement into small sub parts. And for each sub part you can write code and see the results.
With this approach you can build up from zero to the final solution. You can visialize data and results. You can extract output in the form of reports.
And you can also finally put this Notebook into production as the final DSML product.
On Kaggle you get to see how the top DSML professionals have solved problems. Their Notebooks are there for you to see and learn from. This is like working with the top DSML people but from the comfort of your home and country.
Discussions from the top professionals in the industry
Discussions on Kaggle are across many topics. These discussions are a gold mine. In these forums you get to learn from DSML professionals asking very important and critical questions.
These questions are based on data quality, feature engineering, model selection, performance testing of model results and many other critical aspects of DSML work.
The responses to these questions reveals the best practices and alternative approaches that DSML people apply in solving challenging problems. You can very well imagine that having access to such discussions can increase your understanding of DSML by leaps and bounds.
These are evolving discussions so you should keep coming back to the forums to see who how the discussion has changed over time. You are seeing the industry change in real-time. This is what it means to be at the cutting-edge.
Courses
Kaggle Courses are short introductions into all aspects of DSML. You can find introduction to programming, data analysis, machine learning and deep neural network related courses.