How does a chemist with a postdoc in drug design end up working as a data scientist at an e-commerce home furnishings company? “Ha, so it’s a long story actually,” says Jen Wang, data science manager on the Marketing team at Wayfair. Jen always had an interest in healthcare, and……
John stands out in a room. With a flaming red beard and an arm of tattoos, he looks like he might be more at home in a Nordic tavern than an office. But once you notice his Captain Hammer t-shirt, the Gandalf action figure on his desk, and start talking……
This week in Wayfair Data Science’s Explainer Series, Data Science Tech Lead Peter B. Golbus discusses machine learning from a theoretical computer science perspective. In this video, we describe multiclass classification as an encoding task, i.e. a process for building compression schemes that convert large “files” (feature vectors) into small……
Introduction: Interior design and home decoration involve a high amount of guesswork. In addition to the visual appearance of each individual item, the arrangement of these items in a room and how well they fit together are also highly important. These considerations combine to create the notoriously subjective concept of……
This week in Wayfair Data Science’s explainer series, we’re discussing object pose estimation, an important problem in robotics and augmented reality (AR) applications. In robotics, when given a 3D model of an object a mobile robot must be able to localize it in space in order to manipulate it. This……
Introduction If you are a Wayfair customer looking for some wall art to decorate your house, chances are you will land on our wall art SuperBrowse page (see image below or link here). This page shows a grid of 48 products, all of which are pieces of wall art. Those……
Wayfair has a strong emphasis on causal inference when evaluating the impact of business strategies. The assumptions of experimentation and regression are critical to know your models are capturing true effects and not confounding variables. In this video, Wayfair data scientist Dan VanLunen outlines some of these key assumptions along……
This week in Wayfair Data Science’s explainer series, Senior Machine Learning Engineer Tim Zhang lays out what you need to know about training image synthesis. Training image synthesis is a fairly young project for the Computer Vision team at Wayfair. We have explored a few different use cases that can……
In January 2019, Wayfair Data Science was thrilled to host our third immersion program for graduate students in quantitative fields. Our largest round yet, this program brought 25 PhD candidates from 12 different universities to spend a week with the data science team at Wayfair’s headquarters in Boston. Longer than……
In this installment, Archi Mitra (Senior Machine Learning Engineer on the Computer Vision team) lays out an intro to Human-in-the-loop systems, which are used in every Computer Vision project here at Wayfair. Our Visual Search, Object Detection, Room & Style algorithm leverages this system to annotate training data and validate……
This week, Zephy McKanna sets out to explain Multi-Armed bandits. Here at Wayfair, we are constantly testing new algorithms, product sort orders, marketing, and other messages using epsilon-first Multi-Armed Bandits – also known as A/B tests. We are also employing some more interesting MAB algorithms, like Thompson Sampling, to dynamically……
