Learning Data Science with Kaggle 2026: Zero-to-Master Deep Turkish Guide

## 1. What is Kaggle? Founded 2010 by Anthony Goldbloom, acquired by Google in 2017. World's largest data science + ML community platform. 18M+ registered users in 2026. ## 2. Five Tiers Novice → Contributor → Expert → Master → Grandmaster. Each tier in 4 categories (Competitions, Notebooks, Datasets, Discussion). ## 3. Kaggle Learn 20+ free mini courses (2-5 hours each). Best entry point for beginners. ## 4. Competition Types Featured, Research, Recruitment, Getting Started, Playground, Community, Code Competitions, Simulation. ## 5. Tabular Standard Stack XGBoost + LightGBM + CatBoost + Optuna + custom feature engineering. CPU sufficient. ## 6. CV/NLP Stack PyTorch + timm + albumentations + Hugging Face transformers. GPU required. ## 7. Team Formation Tabular: 2-3 people. CV/NLP: 3-5 people. Find teammates via Discord, GitHub, meetups. ## 8. Turkish Community Discord "Kaggle Türkiye", Telegram, LinkedIn groups, Kaggle Days Istanbul annual meetup. ## 9. Job Profile Optimization Expert+ tier, 5+ quality Notebooks, GitHub link, LinkedIn integration, recent activity. ## 10. Conclusion 6-12 months disciplined work for Expert tier. Hybrid Kaggle + real projects strongest for job search.