Titanic Data Competition - Submission 8

I tried a couple of variations on my best submission to Kaggle today, but did not improve my score.

Remember that my best score ( 0.79904) so far is based on a logistic regression model with the following terms:

• male (ie gender)
• pclass
• fare
• fare per person
• Title
• age * class
• sex * class
• combined age (this is age, is missing values based on the median of respective Title)
• family (total of sibsp and parch)

My first submission (31)  was to remove family and add sibsp and parch. This resulted in score of 0.79426 - slightly under my best score.

Second submission (32) was to run a backwards elimination, and identify the following model:

• pclass
• Title
• sex * class
• combined age
• family

This scored 0.78947, not too far under the best score, but with 5 predictors rather than 9 (although that won't have been the situation once SPSS automatically recoded Title into multiple dummy variables)

Third submission (33) was to create a new variable "child". Using combined age variable, cases with age less than or equal to 18 were coded  1 , with cases over 18 being coded 0..

This produced a score of 0.79426.

Still haven't got past the 0.80 threshold !