How to use Kaggle datasets in Google Colab?

A quick guide to use Kaggle datasets inside Google Colab

1. Download the Kaggle API token.

• Sign in to the Kaggle Account. If you don’t have a Kaggle account, first sign up.
• Go to “Account”, go down the page, and find the “API” section.
• Click the “Create New API Token” button.

• The “kaggle.json” file will be downloaded.
• You’ll be also able to see a message “Ensure kaggle.json is in the location ~/.kaggle/kaggle.json to use the API” in a green background.

• If you open the “kaggle.json” file, you can see your Kaggle “username” and a “key”.

2. Mount the Google drive to the Colab notebook.

What does “Mount” Google Drive mean?

It means giving access to the files in your google drive to Colab notebook.

• Go to your Colab notebook. Run the following lines of codes.

from google.colab import drive
drive.mount("/content/gdrive", force_remount=True)

• Now you can access the files in Google Drive from the Colab notebook.

• Later we’re going to download the Kaggle dataset into your google drive. So you can access that dataset from the Colab notebook.

3 . Upload the “kaggle.json” file into Google drive.

• Go to the folder in google drive where you want to download the Kaggle dataset.
• Upload the “kaggle.json” into that folder.

4. Install Kaggle API.

!pip install kaggle

• Change the current working directory to “/content/gdrive/MyDrive/DataSets/house_price_data/”

%cd /content/gdrive/MyDrive/DataSets/house_price_data/

• Run the following code to configure the path to “kaggle.json”.

import os
os.environ['KAGGLE_CONFIG_DIR'] = "/content/gdrive/MyDrive/DataSets/house_price_data/"

5. Download the dataset.

• Here I’m going to download the “House Prices dataset”.

• You may need to click the “I understand and accept” button under the “Rules ” section to agree to be bound with the rules.

• Click the “Data” section and copy the following line of code.

• Paste the code in the Colab notebook.
• Add the “!” mark at the front and run the code.

!kaggle competitions download -c house-prices-advanced-regression-techniques

• Downloading …

• Run the “ls” command to check the dataset files.

• Dataset was successfully downloaded. Now load the dataset and have fun!

References:

Google Colab: how to read data from my google drive?

Kaggle/kaggle-api

House Prices - Advanced Regression Techniques