From Kaggle's competition details:
The sinking of the RMS Titanic is one of the most infamous shipwrecks in history. On April 15, 1912, during her maiden voyage, the Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg, killing 1502 out of 2224 passengers and crew. This sensational tragedy shocked the international community and led to better safety regulations for ships.
One of the reasons that the shipwreck led to such loss of life was that there were not enough lifeboats for the passengers and crew. Although there was some element of luck involved in surviving the sinking, some groups of people were more likely to survive than others, such as women, children, and the upper-class.
Objective: Apply the tools of machine learning to predict which passengers survived the tragedy.
| variable name | description |
|---|---|
| survival | Survival (0 = No; 1 = Yes) |
| pclass | Passenger Class (1 = 1st; 2 = 2nd; 3 = 3rd) |
| name | Name |
| sex | Sex |
| age | Age |
| sibsb | Number of Siblings/Spouses Aboard |
| parch | Number of Parents/Children Aboard |
| ticket | Ticket Number |
| fare | Passenger Fare |
| cabin | Cabin |
| embarked | Port of Embarkation (C = Cherbourg; Q = Queenstown; S = Southampton) |
Pclass is a proxy for socio-economic status (SES) [1st ~ Upper; 2nd ~ Middle; 3rd ~ Lower]
Age is in years; fractional if age is less than one (1). If age is estimated, it is in the form xx.5
With respect to the family relation variables (i.e. sibsp and parch) some relations were ignored. Here are the definitions used for sibsp and parch.
Sibling: Brother, Sister, Stepbrother, or Stepsister of Passenger Aboard Titanic
Spouse: Husband or Wife of Passenger Aboard Titanic (Mistresses and Fiances Ignored)
Parent: Mother or Father of Passenger Aboard Titanic
Child: Son, Daughter, Stepson, or Stepdaughter of Passenger Aboard Titanic
Other family relatives excluded from this study include cousins, nephews/nieces, aunts/uncle, and in-laws. Some children traveled only with a nanny, therefore parch=0 for them. Some traveled with very close friends or neighbors in a village; however, the definitions do not support such relations.