What happened when I tried out PyTorch on the Titanic dataset

I have been in the process of learning new programming skills and decided to take a free online course in PyTorch, which is an relatively new (circa 2016) open source library maintained by Facebook. I have tried Google’s TensorFlow in the past and I was never able to get the models to predict properly, so hoped PyTorch would give me better results. One thing I have learned from taking an online course in PyTorch is the fact that there are a lot of steps that must be completed before the estimator will give a prediction.

The Titanic dataset is a very well known dataset, with the problem statement reads as follows:-

“The sinking of the Titanic is one of the most infamous shipwrecks in history.

On April 15, 1912, during her maiden voyage, the widely considered “unsinkable” RMS Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone onboard, resulting in the death of 1502 out of 2224 passengers and crew.

While there was some element of luck involved in surviving, it seems some groups of people were more likely to survive than others.

In this challenge, we ask you to build a predictive model that answers the question: “what sorts of people were more likely to survive?” using passenger data (ie name, age, gender, socio-economic class, etc)”

I created the program in Google Colab, which is a free online Jupyter Notebook that has several libraries already installed in the site, including Pytorch. The fact that Google Colab supports PyTorch is a definite plus because it…

Related posts:

It seems counter-intuitive, I know. The first of January comes with all the ‘new year, new you’ hype and it’s easy to get carried along with the tide of that energy. But within a week 25% of people…