Mental Models 4 Life

A friend in Australia was contemplating a move to Singapore and asked me about my experience.

Have you noticed more and more shopping malls are offering free wifi?

Before – We came home to this garden after 3.5 years away.

I spent five years working as a consulting data scientist for EMC/Pivotal.

Outlier detection is an important tool in risk modelling.

Suppose we have two entities P1 and P2 and P1 holds a training dataset and P2 holds a dataset .

I woke up on New Year’s Eve to the sight of an owl perching on top of my air-conditioner condenser unit outside.

Most modern big data platforms support parallel execution of (non-native) code written in languages like Python, Perl, R, and Java.

Most mechanical watches operate at an accuracy of +/- 12 seconds per day.

While doing a project involving survival analysis a while back, I learned a useful technique for reducing survival analysis to binary regression.

Incentive drives behaviour.

Sometimes I can’t help but wonder whether data science as a discipline is still in the dark ages.

Most of us have heard of this little puzzle in retail analytics: Assuming we know products A and B are usually purchased together from market basket analysis, how do we place them on shelves to maximise sales?

Content-based recommendation engines are typically done in two steps.

An interesting story I learned recently while reading the excellent book Time’s Pendulum by Jo Ellen Barnett is the history of how we came to have 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute.

The Pareto Principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

As the saying goes, retail is detail and to be successful in retail analytics, one needs to get many small things right.

The book A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith provides a succinct description of the common denominators of financial euphoria, illustrated beautifully with actual euphoric episodes through the ages.

The book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki is probably the worst book of the personal-finance genre I have ever read, containing numerous bad advice and generally encouraging hubris instead of prudence in financial decision-making (in the name of entr…

Everyone with a rudimentary understanding of text analytics knows about term-frequency-inverse-document-frequency (TF-IDF) vectors.

As part of a broader data science project, I recently had the chance to undertake a digitisation project to augment the structured dataset we have for analysis.

Unifying logic and probability is an active and ongoing research topic of great interest to many.

When I was building the Data Science Centre of Excellence at Reliance Industries, I once interviewed a world-class researcher who has worked at multiple institutions, including Yahoo and Google, and he told me something I didn’t understand till then.

Much has been written about the merits of passive index investing using Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

Here is a short (and somewhat unusual) course on statistical machine learning that I have delivered multiple times over the last few years.

A major deficiency in many university-level computer science programs is neglect for training in fundamental mathematical skills.

Colleagues and friends often ask me for book recommendations on data science.

I have been studying and experimenting with online learning algorithms for support vector machines (SVMs) for a while now, primarily with the intention of understanding how they can be used to learn SVM models on large multi-terabyte datasets.

A colleague recently came back from his MBA class with a useful insight: Agile practices work like a (financial) leverage in project management, magnifying good things on the way up and bad things on the way down.

In this set of notes, I derive the common Bayesian estimators for Bernoulli distributions like the Laplace estimator and the Krichevsky-Trofimov estimator.

I spent a year working in Mumbai, India (May 2012 to May 2013).

Partial Least Squares (PLS) is a widely used technique in chemometrics, especially in the case where there is multi-collinearity in the set of variables; the number of variables is larger than the number of data points; and there are multiple response var…

Telcos everywhere are working on initiatives to better monetise their data.

R is commonly thought of as a functional programming language.

The Macau gaming stocks have been smashed in the last 18 months, down 70% in certain cases.

I have given quite a few data science training courses over the years and those conducted for industry participants are, without a doubt, the most challenging ones.

“You’ve got to have models in your head.