[Goosee]

Sine this is a competition, does someone mind explaining the reason for people to publicly post notebooks in the "Notebooks" section?

Seems counter-intuitive to provide competitors with free information, unless you are trying to throw them off.

[2-tpg]

Posting notebooks can get you upvotes, which contribute towards becoming a Kaggle (Grand)Master. It is also a good way to "win" some attention and goodwill, without spending months trying to actually win the competition itself. Publishing Notebooks also helps you improve your coding/presentation skills, for a popular notebook needs to be useful for a wide audience (or fairly competitive).

The best techniques, certainly coming from teams, are hardly ever published as Notebooks. But yes, many winning teams will eventually incorporate some of the information in the Notebooks, if only to hedge against the others doing the same.

[minkzilla]

Not a frequent Kaggle user but from what I’ve seen the ones posted in notebooks are baseline examples. The things anyone who is competitive enough to win has probably thought of and dismissed or could implement themselves in half an hour and iterate from there.

[mjn]

As a current example: the highest-scoring entry that has an associated notebook at the moment is basically a clean example of how to apply XGBoost [1] to this dataset. XGBoost ends up being tried in nearly every Kaggle competition, so the person isn't giving away many secrets there.

[1] https://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/latest/