An obsessively detailed guide to Customer Lifetime Value techniques and real-world applications — Call me crazy, but I’ve challenged myself to create the most extensive guide to Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) out there. Codenamed “everything the other tutorials left out”, I’m sharing all the ideas and learnings I gained while working on this topic in a real-world data science team, with imperfect data…

Part one of a comprehensive, practical guide to CLV techniques and real-world use-cases — Whether you’re a data scientist, a marketer or a data leader, chances are that if you’ve Googled “Customer Lifetime Value”, you’ve been disappointed. I felt that too, back when I was helping lead a new CLV research project in a data science team in the e-commerce domain. We went looking…

An exclusive sneak-peek at a revolutionary new method for training neural networks — My good friend and humble genius Dr Danko Nikolić recently shared an unpublished paper with me, thinking I might be interested. Was I ever. Reading it made me feel like I was witnessing a historic moment before anyone else did, and I was immediately bursting to share. Thankfully, Danko agreed…

A not-quite-buzzfeed quiz to check your biases; an intro to critical algorithm studies; and ideas for enabling ethical developers. — About once a month over on Substack, I compile a handful of the most interesting and useful things I’ve shared via Twitter on a specific theme into a short article about that topic. March is Women’s History Month, so this twitter Resources Roundup is an especially important one. That’s why…

A beginners’ guide to working through complex SQL questions — and understanding the answers — If you’re reading this, you’re probably using HackerRank to learn SQL or prep for a coding interview. I did this too, but a lot of HackerRank solutions out there confused me more than they helped. So I did what any self-respecting data scientist would do: I memorised the answers, and…

Practical lessons from being let go, and how you can apply them too. So you got fired. Or made redundant. Potato, potata, it probably stings as much either way. This just happened to me, too. My employer went into financial survival mode, and my department had to go. So I…

A practical introduction to a technology you use every day. — Ever wondered how Google Translate’s ‘detect language’ feature works? Of course you didn’t, you had better things to do. But I went looking, and couldn’t find the answer (even though I’ve literally written a book on Natural Language Processing (NLP)). It’s Google’s secret sauce. So today, I’ll instead show you…

Artificial Intelligence: it’s a topic surrounded by hype, hope, pessimism, and a healthy dose of confusion. Many people have many questions, as I have learned through discussions within my own personal circle. …

One of the most remarkable things I learned during my studies in Computational Linguistics was that we still don’t know how language is processed in the brain. We know that an average human has around 80,000 words in their vocabulary, and that somehow, when we speak, our brains are able…