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…
This week in Wayfair Data Science’s explainer series, Tim O’Connor discusses experimentation in the context of data science. Experiments are crucial to data science, helping to determine which version of a model is to use in future iterations of a system or generating new sources of data unavailable in a…
Welcome back to Wayfair Data Science’s Explainer Series! This week Afshaan Mazagonwalla will be speaking about Bayesian Machine Learning. Wayfair uses Bayesian and Reinforcement Learning based techniques for balancing the exploration – exploitation trade off between new and popular items in ranking products on the website and for recommending sales…
Find out about how Wayfair tackles product recommendations in our first installment! Wayfair Data Science is composed of a number of sub-teams, each tackling a different set of specific business challenges. In order to give you a taste of the wide array of people and workstreams we have here on…
So, you graduated college, spent half a decade in a quantitative PhD program, maybe took a postdoctoral fellowship….and now what? You may want to stay the course and pursue a tenure track faculty position at a university–or, you may not. While the pressure to remain within the academy post PhD…
Uplift models seek to predict the incremental value attained in response to a treatment. For example, if we want to know the value of showing an advertisement to someone, typical response models will only tell us that a person is likely to purchase after being given an advertisement, though…
TV advertising offers unique advantages over more transactional forms of online marketing. It gives advertisers the chance to garner consumer attention over an extended period of time, and allows advertisers to tell stories and project values that will stick in the public’s mind. As a household brand and the destination…
Workplace diversity is not just an ethical issue. Teams that overcome diversity issues (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, experience) often achieve greater productivity than homogeneous teams. If you’re surrounded by people who are different from you, you will be constantly challenged to reexamine facts, think deeper, and explain better. In this…
Top left to right: Yumeng Ma (University of Michigan), Steven Yin (Columbia), Michael Spece, Carnegie Mellon University), Quinn Donahoe (University of Pittsburgh), Cristian Gavrus (UC Berkeley) Bottom left to right: Ai Xu (Harvard), Elyse Norton (NYU), Aybike Ulusan (Northeastern),Yuija Zhou (Boston University) It’s safe to say that Wayfair’s Data…
Come find us! Next week, Wayfair Data Science will be hitting the road. Data scientists and engineers from across our teams will be attending the SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Stockholm, Sweden. Here…
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…
