Sean Taylor — Business Decision Problems

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