Would retrieving elevation data from the SRTM and geopy libraries be considered the use of an external dataset? I'm not using any specific dataset, but I'm accessing elevation information based on latitude and longitude through these libraries. Is there anyone knowledgeable about this who can provide an answer? Is there any violation of the competition rules? If it's not prohibited, the variable had a significantly positive impact on my model's performance. Below, I've included the relevant code.

import srtm import geopy

elevation_data = srtm.get_data()

def get_elevation(latitude, longitude): elevation = elevation_data.get_elevation(latitude, longitude) return elevation

df['NEW_elevation'] = df.apply(lambda row: get_elevation(row['LAT'], row['LON']), axis=1)