R Starterpack (499.65 on RMSE leaderboard - 20th position) {recipes} + {tweedie xgboost}

A few years ago a member of my team, who is an actuary and Kaggle master, used to delight in tormenting the rest of us when his models out-performed ours on leaderboards.

He would always insist his out-performance was due to his process of selecting lucky seeds.

We all knew full well there’s no such thing, that generalises to the private leaderboard, but many a time I caught myself trying a few different seeds to see if I can get lucky and beat his model.

There is of course nothing wrong in running a few models with different seeds and taking the average result. That’s a recognised technique called bagging which will often improve a model at the cost of implementation complexity.

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