Serving effective personalized product recommendations is critical to providing a pleasant shopping experience for customers at Wayfair. To do this, the Wayfair Data Science team builds state of the art recommender systems that leverage the customer’s previous browsing history to surface products that match their interests. This week in Wayfair……
Most machine learning algorithms are designed to train on balanced datasets. Resultantly, when our data are highly imbalanced, a typical model will have atrocious recall. In this video, Wayfair Senior Data Scientist Trent Woodbury explains the three most common ways of handling this imbalanced data problem. Trent Woodbury……
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……
