Kaggle Competition Categories
Reference for mapping competition types to API categories.
API Category Mapping
| Competition Type | API category Value |
Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Featured Prediction | featured |
Standard prize competitions |
| Research Prediction | research |
Research-oriented, often with novel evaluation |
| Playground | playground |
Learning-focused, smaller prizes or swag |
| Getting Started | gettingStarted |
Semi-permanent tutorials (Titanic, Housing, etc.) |
| Recruitment | recruitment |
Company-sponsored talent search |
| Masters | masters |
Restricted to Masters/Grandmasters tier |
| Simulation | featured |
Tags contain "simulation"; uses agent-based eval |
| Game Arena | featured or all |
Tags contain "game" or "arena" |
| Featured Hackathon | featured |
Tags contain "hackathon"; shorter duration |
| Community | (varies) | Catch-all; query category="" minus known types |
Identifying Special Types
Some competition types share the featured category but can be distinguished by tags:
- Simulation: Look for tags like
simulation,agent,game-theory - Game Arena: Look for tags like
game,arena,multi-agent - Hackathon: Look for tags like
hackathon; also tend to have deadlines < 7 days from launch. Hackathons are classified as active until winners are announced (no leaderboard — results appear on a Winners tab after judging, often weeks/months after deadline) - Code competitions: Check
isKernelsSubmissionsOnly == true
Notes on Getting Started Competitions
Getting Started competitions (Titanic, Housing Prices, Digit Recognizer, etc.) are semi-permanent and don't have meaningful "launch" or "completion" dates. They should generally be excluded from "recently launched" reports unless specifically requested.
Querying Strategy
- Query each specific category (
featured,research,playground, etc.) withsort_by=recentlyCreatedto get the latest in each bucket. - Also query with no category filter (empty string) to catch competitions that may not appear under specific categories.
- Deduplicate by slug since the same competition may appear in multiple queries.