3 years spent eating, sleeping, and breathing data science — When I got my first corporate “data scientist” gig a few years ago, I barely knew what a decision tree was, I had no clue about why people kept talking about random forests, and I had no grasp on what people actually meant when they talked about “AI,” which to…

Advice for anyone looking or hiring for data science jobs — Data science is as popular as ever but paradoxically also seems more fragmented and ill-defined than ever before. It can be quite difficult for newcomers to figure out how to break into the field, and perhaps even more difficult, it can be for managers to figure out how to hire…

A simple trick for improving model performance when labels are ordered. — When you have a multiclass classification problem and there is an order to the classes, it is known as an “ordinal regression” problem. An example could be the classification of a student’s performance into categories A > B > C > D > E. The issue in solving this kind…

When data science becomes an obsession. — For the longest time, I have wondered why some data scientists spend every waking moment of their day obsessively consuming knowledge, honing their skills, participating in competitions, creating hobby projects, and generally expanding their horizons. Meanwhile, others are more comfortable with the status quo and exploiting current skills to solve…

State of the art results using Chemprop & graph neural networks — In this post, we use Machine Learning / AI to predict the properties of small molecules (a task known as QSAR). This is done by using state-of-the-art graph neural networks from the open-source library Chemprop. Typical pharmaceuticals come in the form of small molecules that can regulate some biological processes…

A tutorial on simplifying MLOps using open source tools — Figuring out what people mean when they say “MLOps” is hard. Figuring out how to properly do MLOps, even for a technical person, is perhaps even more difficult. How difficult must doing MLOps be, then, for a citizen data scientist that knows nothing of web technologies, Kubernetes, monitoring, cloud infrastructure…

Trend detection on Towards Data Science posts — Today I scraped 41739 medium post titles from the publication Towards Data Science. Based on these titles, I wanted to try and find out which topics have been trending over time, as well as which topics are trending today. In order to perform the trend detection analysis I wanted to…

A comprehensive MLOps tutorial with open source tools — Getting machine learning (ML) models into production is hard work. Depending on the level of ambition, it can be surprisingly hard, actually. In this post, I’ll go over my personal thoughts (with implementation examples) on principles suitable for the journey of putting ML models into production within a regulated industry…

Can we visualize the context being used for search? — Using transformer-based models for searching text documents is awesome; nowadays it is easy to implement using the huggingface library, and results are often very impressive. Recently I wanted to understand why a given result was returned— my initial thoughts went to various papers and blog posts relating digging into the…