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…
When people think of Wayfair, they often think of the slick website, catchy TV ads, and personable customer service. They also obviously think of furniture. What they don’t think about, however, is how that furniture gets to the customer. Many people don’t realize that UPS and FedEx won’t bring a…
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…
Search is critical to the customer experience at Wayfair. What we show on the first page of results is incredibly important for users. The graph below shows what many people might already know when it comes to browsing and search habits: The majority of customers rarely look beyond the products…
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…
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…
Next week, Wayfair Data Science will be at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Salt Lake City. We’re bringing data scientists and engineers from several different teams, plus a VR rig to try out the shopping experience of the future (come find us at booth 224!). We pride…
Wayfair has over nine million unique items in its catalog, and tens of thousands of new ones are added every day. These products come from 8,000 different suppliers who sometimes sell the exact same products — two completely unrelated suppliers could be buying the exact same area rug from a…
Earlier this month, the Pricing Algorithms team had a Community Service Hack Day here at our office, dedicating an afternoon to work on simple tools that could be used as part of any project. The day was an opportunity to fill any knowledge gaps in how our team overcomes common…
In April, I attended the Data Science Research Symposium at University of Massachusetts Amherst and gave a short talk highlighting Wayfair’s marketing data science projects. The full video and slides are below, but here’s an overview. Goals of marketing data science at Wayfair As the largest online retailer of furnishings…
At the beginning of February, I attended one of ACM’s premier conferences, WSDM 2018 in Los Angeles. Apart from the Hollywood-style banquet dinner on a boat, I was looking forward to the opportunity to talk through ideas with some of the brightest minds in the world from both academia and…
