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January 21, 2019
Welcome back to Wayfair Data Science's Explainer Series! This week, Afshaan Mazagonwalla will be speaking about Bayesian Machine Learning
January 7, 2019
Find out about how Wayfair tackles product recommendations in our first installment!
December 28, 2018
At Wayfair, we pride ourselves on our speedy response times to issues during heavy web traffic to ensure a smooth customer experience. As we scale and continue adding products to our catalog, it is imperative that our backend infrastructure is able to handle increased traffic, especially during retail peaks and promotional sales.
November 15, 2018
As we head into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and retail’s peak season for 2018, I wanted to reflect back on some excitement we had earlier in the year at Wayfair; specifically how we reacted and built, as a tech team, toward challenges we hadn’t seen before. I hope other e-commerce and tech leaders who are on a scaling journey will be interested in what we hit, and frankly, it was an adventure that anyone in the technology might find interesting.
October 31, 2018
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 can at times feel overwhelming, if you’re in the latter group and are considering making the switch from academia to industry, know that you’re not alone.
October 25, 2018
Being a long distance runner has taught me a lot about being an engineering leader. I’ve spent the last 15 years running races of all distances, some of which were great, and others that we’ll just call “learning opportunities”. I’ve also spent those same 15 years honing my skills as an engineering leader, during a career filled with great wins and more than a few “learning opportunities” as well.
October 17, 2018
Uplift models seek to predict the incremental value attained in response to a treatment. For example, if we want to know the value of showing an advertisement to someone, typical response models will only tell us that a person is likely to purchase after being given an advertisement, though they may have been likely to purchase already. Uplift models will predict how much more likely they are to purchase after being shown the ad. The most scalable uplift modeling packages to date are theoretically rigorous, but, in practice, they can be prohibitively slow. We have written a Python package, pylift, that implements a transformative method wrapped around scikit-learn to allow for (1) quick implementation of uplift, (2) rigorous uplift evaluation, and (3) an extensible python-based framework for future uplift method implementations.
October 15, 2018
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 on the first page of search results.
October 8, 2018
The world of owning home furnishings is similar to owning clothes: Nobody wants to see someone else wearing the same dress. Wayfair has a zillion couches in many different colors, designs, and styles to choose from, and we expanded that reach even further when we created our Custom Upholstery Experience.