There is no denying that Pokemon had a big influence on all the kids of my generation. I remember being 8 or 9 and looking forward to finishing school so I could catch up on the adventures of Ash and Pikachu. I also remember the fun I would have playing Pokemon Stadium on Nintendo 64 with my cousins on the weekend. The phenomenal popularity of Pokemon GO last year further confirmed that the nostalgia factor is still strong for a lot of people, even to this day.

I was browsing Kaggle for datasets to practice classification algorithms when I came across one describing the first 6 generations of Pokemon with a total of 721 Pokemon, of which 46 are legendary. Bingo! I thought. This dataset is not only a fun way to experiment with classifiers to predict whether a Pokemon is legendary or not, but also provides a way to simulate an end-to-end machine learning project. Moreover, evaluating the performance of our models will require careful thinking since only a small fraction (6.4% to be exact) of the Pokemon are legendary.

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