cover of episode Sean Taylor — Business Decision Problems

Sean Taylor — Business Decision Problems

2021/5/13
logo of podcast Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

Shownotes Transcript

Sean joins us to chat about ML models and tools at Lyft Rideshare Labs, Python vs R, time series forecasting with Prophet, and election forecasting.


Sean Taylor is a Data Scientist at (and former Head of) Lyft Rideshare Labs, and specializes in methods for solving causal inference and business decision problems. Previously, he was a Research Scientist on Facebook's Core Data Science team. His interests include experiments, causal inference, statistics, machine learning, and economics.

Connect with Sean: Personal website: https://seanjtaylor.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanjtaylor LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanjtaylor/


Topics Discussed: 0:00 Sneak peek, intro 0:50 Pricing algorithms at Lyft 07:46 Loss functions and ETAs at Lyft 12:59 Models and tools at Lyft 20:46 Python vs R 25:30 Forecasting time series data with Prophet 33:06 Election forecasting and prediction markets 40:55 Comparing and evaluating models 43:22 Bottlenecks in going from research to production

Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-sean-taylor

Links Discussed: "How Lyft predicts a rider’s destination for better in-app experience"": https://eng.lyft.com/how-lyft-predicts-your-destination-with-attention-791146b0a439 Prophet: https://facebook.github.io/prophet/ Andrew Gelman's blog post "Facebook's Prophet uses Stan": https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/03/01/facebooks-prophet-uses-stan/ Twitter thread "Election forecasting using prediction markets": https://twitter.com/seanjtaylor/status/1270899371706466304 "An Updated Dynamic Bayesian Forecasting Model for the 2020 Election": https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/nw1dzd02/release/1


Get our podcast on these platforms: Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​ Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​ Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​​ YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube​​ Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud​

Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning: http://wandb.me/slack​​

Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more: https://wandb.ai/fully-connected