A conceptual guide to getting started — In today’s landscape of voluminous data, complex customer interactions, and Machine Learning models (for recommendations and propensities), understanding the customer journey is paramount for ultimate business success. Traditional databases are an option for supporting this understanding — but at some point, they lack the efficiency to do so in a…

A parallel between the critique of sampling and generative AI — If you haven’t seen it in the news of the past over the past couple of months (or year), ChatGPT took the world by storm. If you don’t know what this is (you likely haven’t seen the news), ChatGPT is a large-language model developed by OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed company. It…

How to do it in an enterprise company when you have no idea where to start — Co-authored by Jacob H. Marquez and Shijing Fang As data scientists working for an enterprise company, we believe that moving from ad hoc analyses to something reproducible is ideal. Our goal is to build a data science product with which end users can directly interact with our data and/or models…

Transferring my experiences with planning my wedding to my day-to-day job as a data scientist — As a data scientist, I fell in love with uncovering correlations between variables, building models that can predict an outcome, and designing beautiful visualizations. Read other Data Science at Microsoft articles on Medium from my colleagues to get tips on how to do those things. As a human, I fell…

How fix an out of sync unique identifier in a Django data model — In my previous article, I talked about building a data model for my coffee recommendations web app (obviously, built on Django). Throughout that process, I wrote Python code to set up, deploy, and update the data model with existing data. This code was all “within” the Django framework — i.e…

5 themes of my journey to becoming a data scientist — Back in 2011 when I was a sophomore at the University of Washington and required to declare a major, psychology was a no brainer (pun intended). The subject is endlessly fascinating, the professors were engaging, and the linear algebra pre-reqs were non-existent. …

Become more business-savvy, a better thinker, and overall better human through listening — The art of data science, especially for so-called “industry data scientists” (i.e. those who work within the corporate world), is slowly converging with other domains. Experts talk about the role splitting into a path that is more “business-focused” and another that is more “engineering-focused”. Regardless of what happens, it is…

I dreamed of being a hip-hop artist for all my adolescent life. It consumed my entire world, from how I dressed, how I articulated words, what I spoke about, and, obviously, what I stored on my one-gigabyte MP3 player (remember those?). You could have called me a “hip-hop head.” My…

Back in March 2021, Gartner released their ideas on the top trends of data and analytics. They categorized the ten trends into three categories: accelerating change, operationalizing business value, and distributed everything. At least half of the trends seem to be continuing into the new year. Specifically, I would say…