Our company is very thankful for the models developed for a competition we held through kaggle. The model is in our current release product, and is the current known state of the art for it's task in accuracy / performance.
How sure are you that it works? I know that this sounds really flippant, but I have seen a number of well regarded models that when we / I took them to bits were discovered to actually not be doing better than dominant class prediction, and in a couple of cases had actually become arbitrary.
When did someone last really pick it apart in its operational environment?
yeah, the model works. Its individual identification task there are many individuals, and we have lots of labeled data that we held out from the competition.
There were several top contenders that did ensemble. We went with a single model (also in top few) for reasons of integration cost. I Don't actually remember which placed first for the competition.
