As Data Science has become increasingly important to Wayfair’s success, so has the quest to find great people to join our team – individuals who are intelligently connected to their work and constantly learn, study, experiment, and create. Hiring for and branding our data science initiatives is merely one element……
Multiple recommendation systems at Wayfair use collaborative filtering based models to understand user behavior and identify like-minded customers. Despite its success, collaborative filtering has a few significant drawbacks, such as the cold start problem and a limited scope of recommendable products. By leveraging image based product embeddings, Wayfair has created……
Wayfair offers a zillion things home, with one of the world’s largest online selections of furniture, home furnishings, décor and goods, including more than eight million products from over 10,000 suppliers. Wayfair’s expanding Visual Search team is leveraging deep learning and our expansive catalog of images to create an exciting……
At Wayfair, technology and data expertise enable data scientists to transform new web datasets into intelligent machine algorithms that re-imagine how traditional commerce works. In this post, we introduce how visual tools like Violin Plots amplify our data acumen to unlock deep insights. The savvy data scientist recognizes the value……
In this first blog post focused on marketing attribution & measurement, we share insights on how Wayfair has leveraged a unique combination of geographic splitting and optimization techniques to measure the performance of our various marketing channels Key article takeaways: Geographic splitting is a convenient and generally applicable tool……
Search has long been an essential tool for Wayfair that enables users to discover products among millions. While we offer great text and faceted search, those features can only go so far. It can be difficult to precisely describe an item in mind, especially in a way search engines can……
Me: Doug, what are you doing? Doug: Solving the problem of class struggle with one of Greg’s classifiers. Me: Karl Marx should call his office. What do you mean by that? Doug: Let me explain… Class struggle at Wayfair search used to manifest itself as searches for ‘red cups’ that returned……
These days, in the big data community, we often hear how biologists have adopted and are using distributed computing technologies that were first introduced to solve problems in software engineering. The fact that Wayfair has done the inverse and used a tool initially developed to help biologists cluster similar proteins……
Our story begins in Holland in 1997, where a researcher named Stijn van Dongen, who is pretty good at Go, has a 5-minute flash of insight into modeling flows with stochastic matrices. He writes a thesis about it and makes a toolkit called MCL with a free software license. Flash……
When you sit down to write a recommendations system, there are quite a few well-practiced techniques you can use, and it’s difficult to know in advance how well they are going to work out when applied to your data. Thanks to the Netflix prize, which was initiated in 2006……
