Accelerate analysis by bringing structure to unstructured data — Working with natural language data can often be challenging due to its lack of structure. Most data scientists, analysts and product managers are familiar with structured tables, consisting of rows and columns, but less familiar with unstructured documents, consisting of sentences and words. For this reason, knowing how to approach…

How to model the unexpected and unlikely the Bayesian way. Rare events are by definition, well, rare. But, inevitably they do happen and when they do they have outsized consequences. 9/11 was a tail event. The financial crisis of 2007/08 was a tail event. Coronavirus was a tail event. Many…

A few years ago I developed a model to identify fraudulent transactions for an online two-sided marketplace. My initial model was based on characteristics of the transaction and its context. This model was quite good, but I wanted to make it better. I was already using a Gradient Boosted Tree…

This post is a short addendum to my longer analysis on earnings on Medium. In that post I estimated that one hour of member reading time is worth around $1.62 per day. One of the findings from that analysis is that internal member reading time is a stronger predictor of…

I started writing on Medium in 2017, but only recently joined the partner program. My most popular post (link below) has accumulated 210K views and 95 hours of member reading time. Awesome. In total, I have earned $3.33 from it. Not so awesome. …

Scikit learn is *the* go to package for standard machine learning models in Python. It not only provides most of the core algorithms that you would want to use in practice (i.e. GBMs, Random Forests, Logistic/Linear regression), but also provides a wide range of tranforms for feature preprocessing (e.g. Onehot…

Being an effective data scientist often means being able to identify the right solution for a particular problem. In this post, I want to discuss three techniques that have enabled me to solve tricky problems across multiple contexts, but that aren’t widely used. The three techniques are quantile regression, exponential…

Pytorch is really fun to work with and if you are looking for a framework to get started with neural networks I highly recommend it — see my short tutorial on how to get up and running with a basic neural net in Pytorch here. What many people don’t realise…