Max Halford

Motivation Web scraping is the art of extracting information from web pages.

Context Today marks the 1 year anniversary since I started working at Alan.

Motivation At Alan, we do almost all our data analysis in SQL.

A wild homoglyph appears For instance, can you tell if there’s a difference between H and Η?

Edit – I posted this on Hackernews and got some valuable feedback.

Context This week at Alan I’ve been working on parsing French medical prescriptions.

TLDR You’re a data scientist.

Some context I co-organised a data science competition during the second half of 2020.

I’m currently doing a lot of document processing at work.

I defended my PhD thesis on the 12th of October 2020, exactly 3 years and 11 days after having started it.

Introduction I’m currently working on a problem at work where I have to measure the impact of a growth initiative on a performance metric.

Edit – since writing this article, I have discovered that the method I describe is a form of zero-shot learning.

Edit (2021-01-26) – I initially wrote this blog post using version 2.3.1 of LightGBM.

I want to use this post to share some pandas snippets that I find useful.

Motivation Most supervised machine learning algorithms work in the batch setting, whereby they are fitted on a training set offline, and are used to predict the outcomes of new samples.

Server-sent events (SSE) is a mechanism for sending updates from a server to a client.

One of my most popular articles is the one on target encoding.

It is now common practice to train machine learning models offline before putting them behind an API endpoint to serve predictions.

Motivation Suppose you have an infinite stream of feature vectors $x_i$ and targets $y_i$.

Introduction I’ve just spent a few hours looking at under-sampling and how it can help a classifier learn from an imbalanced dataset.

Duplicate detection is the task of finding two or more instances in a dataset that are in fact identical.

Putting machine learning into production is hard.

Imagine that you’re looking to buy a home.

I recently stumbled on a rather fun problem during my PhD.

The days I’m working on a deep learning project.

If you’ve done a bit of Kaggling, then you’ve probably been typing a fair share of df.groupby(some_col).

When you’re doing supervised learning, you often have to deal with categorical variables.

Around the same time last year I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

No this blog post is not about how nice JavaScript can be, instead it’s just another one of my attempts at reproducing modern art with procedural generation and the HTML5 <canvas> element.

Edit – it’s 2022 and I still haven’t written a part 2.

The next stop on my travel through the world of halftoning will be the implementation of Weighted Voronoi Stippling as described in Adrian Secord’s 2002 paper.

I was at a laundrette today and had just finished my book so I had some time to kill.