No two people’s paths to Wayfair are exactly the same. On our data science team alone we employ physicists, neuroscientists, biophysical chemists, economists, mathematicians, statisticians, and more! Our data scientists are united by a love of data and a knack for problem solving, but each person has a different story…
Next week, Wayfair Data Science will be at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Salt Lake City. We’re bringing data scientists and engineers from several different teams, plus a VR rig to try out the shopping experience of the future (come find us at booth 224!). We pride…
Wayfair has over nine million unique items in its catalog, and tens of thousands of new ones are added every day. These products come from 8,000 different suppliers who sometimes sell the exact same products — two completely unrelated suppliers could be buying the exact same area rug from a…
Last year, Wayfair launched Visual Search, a new and novel way to find products on our website. Users can now upload photos of furniture they like and find visually similar matches in an instant. If you need a little refresher on this technology, the original blog post can be found…
Earlier this month, the Pricing Algorithms team had a Community Service Hack Day here at our office, dedicating an afternoon to work on simple tools that could be used as part of any project. The day was an opportunity to fill any knowledge gaps in how our team overcomes common…
In April, I attended the Data Science Research Symposium at University of Massachusetts Amherst and gave a short talk highlighting Wayfair’s marketing data science projects. The full video and slides are below, but here’s an overview. Goals of marketing data science at Wayfair As the largest online retailer of furnishings…
At Wayfair, the data science teams collaborate with other partner teams to translate business problems into analytical frameworks, leverage data and machine learning to make robust predictions and recommendations, and build engineering architecture to scale up machine learning solutions. In a recent machine learning seminar at Northeastern University in Boston,…
Since I began my tenure at Wayfair as a data scientist, many PhD students and postdocs have reached out to ask for advice about the transition to data science in industry. After a fruitful collection of conversations, I’ve realized that there are popular misconceptions about what it means to be…
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 a specific…
At the beginning of February, I attended one of ACM’s premier conferences, WSDM 2018 in Los Angeles. Apart from the Hollywood-style banquet dinner on a boat, I was looking forward to the opportunity to talk through ideas with some of the brightest minds in the world from both academia and…
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, what we…
