Introduction Every day, Wayfair receives tens of thousands of messages from customers, telling us about their experiences with our products and services through the likes of product reviews, return comments, and various surveys. Considering that our customers spend valuable time writing these, it is fair to assume that they have……
Choosing between school and work can be an either-or proposition for many, whether for financial reasons or because there simply don’t seem to be enough hours in the day. When faced with this decision myself, I initially shared similar concerns. However, I soon found that at Wayfair this can be……
Introduction Uplift models predict the incremental effect of a treatment on the outcome of an individual. In other words, they answer the causal question of how an individual’s behavior will change if we give him/her a specific treatment. At Wayfair, we build uplift models to inform us of whom to……
The Lucas Critique, named after economist Robert Lucas, is a theoretical result that blew up the discipline of macroeconomics in the 1970s, and its implications are directly relevant to much of the work that data scientists are doing today—including work that I am doing on the Algorithms team at Wayfair!……
At Wayfair, we do everything we can to help our customers find exactly the products they need to furnish their homes in the style they envision. But creating all of the necessary elements to allow them to do that is not as easy as one might think. Right now, if……
Understanding price effects is of high importance to any business, but usually it’s not easy to measure. To do this, Wayfair’s algorithms team has been designing modeling and experimental approaches so that we can disentangle the intricate web of causality. In this video, Wayfair Senior Data Scientist Lin Jia explains……
Stylistic preference is an important factor when a home goods customer is deciding which product to buy, but it is very difficult to identify and define. Although designers have established different style categories, labeling a scene as adhering to a particular style is a highly subjective task. Furthermore, customers often……
Introduction When looking for a new piece of furniture to add to a room, customers generally consider two major points: the visual appearance of the new item, and its harmony with the existing furniture inside the room. Together, these two considerations define a customer’s style preferences. Wayfair’s vast product catalog……
Wayfair sells over 10 million products on our website. This vast selection ensures that customers have numerous options when shopping for a particular item; but it also makes effective, personalized product recommendations of vital importance in helping our customers find products that are relevant to their interests. This week in……
Experimentation plays a central role in understanding the business impact of data science strategies and solutions. A few weeks ago, Wayfair Data Science Manager Jerry Chen shared one way Wayfair has improved the experimentation process by building a unified test design and measurement platform (Gemini) for our marketing AB tests……
Introduction One of the core principles of marketing is that messaging customers about what they want or need is much stronger than messaging them about what they don’t. It’s especially important for Wayfair to identify our customers’ needs, since many of our core products are items that are purchased once……
