A/B testing is a tool for supporting decision-making in business, and so in addition to getting the statistics right, it’s really important to communicate well with the non-statisticians who will have the final say on the go/no-go decision. Most A/B tests in practice are testing ratios, conversion rates of various …

I recently read Will Larson’s excellent book Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track. Larson covers the individual contributor (IC, not management) roles that software engineers fill after they are promoted past Senior Software Engineer, with titles like Staff and Principal …

Suppose you’re a data scientist at an e-commerce web site that sells shoes, responsible for supporting A/B tests. Many A/B tests are easy, and there are a number of companies that sell tools that make the easy cases as simple as clicking a few buttons and looking at pretty graphs. But A/B tests can get statistically …

Just a quick post here to note a few professional accomplishments: I just added a new publication to my vita – a peer-reviewed conference proceeedings article about abstractions for building repeated, related versions of similar predictive models. Check out some longer thoughts on Medium, or read the full …

This post was originally published on Medium I recently attended two small conferences — the ISBIS (International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics) 2017 conference, held at IBM Research in Westchester County, and the Domino Data Lab Popup, held in West SoHo. I was invited to speak at ISBIS (slides here, …

This post was originally published on Medium Occasionally when chatting with other data scientists, especially with others who are interested in integrating predictive models into production software system, the word “scaling” comes up. Not this. Although some West Coast data scientists are into this kind of scaling …

This post was originally published on Medium A particularly good way to get a little more out of professional conferences is to blog about your experiences, I think. It makes you focus your thoughts on things like “what’s the big take-away here,” and “what should I be asking people in the hallways?” Rather than just …

This post was originally published on Medium A particularly good talk at Strata NY last year was by Brett Goldstein, former CIO of Chicago, who talked about accountability and transparency in predictive models that affect people’s lives. This struck a strong chord with me, so I wanted to take some time to write down …

This post was originally published on Medium When building a complex system, it’s often helpful to think about the design of that system using patterns and abstractions. Architects and software engineers do so frequently, and the experience of implementing predictive modeling pipelines has recently led to a variety of …