As data scientists, we face a variety of problem types. One of our critical challenges is identifying the proper methodological approach to solve each problem. By doing this, we avoid force-fitting the wrong tool to solve a problem, and we avoid having to reformulate a question to fit… Read more
Right now, Wayfair has about 86,000 rugs available for purchase. On the first page of our rug category page, however, we only have room for the top 48. You see even fewer if you don’t happen to scroll or swipe down. When it comes to our customer’s experience,… Read more
As Data Science has become increasingly important to Wayfair’s success, so has the quest to find great people to join our team – individuals who are intelligently connected to their work and constantly learn, study, experiment, and create. Hiring for and branding our data science initiatives is merely… Read more
Multiple recommendation systems at Wayfair use collaborative filtering based models to understand user behavior and identify like-minded customers. Despite its success, collaborative filtering has a few significant drawbacks, such as the cold start problem and a limited scope of recommendable products. By leveraging image based product embeddings, Wayfair… Read more
Wayfair offers a zillion things home, with one of the world’s largest online selections of furniture, home furnishings, décor and goods, including more than eight million products from over 10,000 suppliers. Wayfair’s expanding Visual Search team is leveraging deep learning and our expansive catalog of images to create an exciting……
At Wayfair, technology and data expertise enable data scientists to transform new web datasets into intelligent machine algorithms that re-imagine how traditional commerce works. In this post, we introduce how visual tools like Violin Plots amplify our data acumen to unlock deep insights. The savvy data scientist… Read more
In this first blog post focused on marketing attribution & measurement, we share insights on how Wayfair has leveraged a unique combination of geographic splitting and optimization techniques to measure the performance of our various marketing channels Key article takeaways:
Search has long been an essential tool for Wayfair that enables users to discover products among millions. While we offer great text and faceted search, those features can only go so far. It can be difficult to precisely describe an item in mind, especially in a way search engines can……
Me: Doug, what are you doing? Doug: Solving the problem of class struggle with one of Greg‘s classifiers. Me: Karl Marx should call his office. What do you mean by that? Doug: Let me explain…
These days, in the big data community, we often hear how biologists have adopted and are using distributed computing technologies that were first introduced to solve problems in software engineering. The fact that Wayfair has done the inverse and used a tool initially developed to help biologists cluster similar proteins……
Our story begins in Holland in 1997, where a researcher named Stijn van Dongen, who is pretty good at Go, has a 5-minute flash of insight into modeling flows with stochastic matrices. He writes a… Read more
