Pushing and reporting my first A/B test in production, and completing "Rafa" | Weekly Report 59

15 Oct 2017 . category: report . Comments
#data science #myntra #kaggle #vlog #books #fitness

At work, the first half of my week was spent in getting my work ready for production, learnt the engineering part of the process. Post launch, i modified a script for reporting the results on the A/B test – the results haven’t been encouraging. We saw a dip in CTR, thereby halting the test! Its time to diagnose our model, and come up with better ML-based approaches to tackle this problem.

I’d like to document some learnings from the whole process, my first experience of exposing my code to a million users:

• Move fast, break things. Exactly what we did. I was moving really slow with my clustering approach, when we decided to move forward with a price heuristic.
• Real-world problems don’t have a validation set. You gotta test your approach with real people!
• Engineering is as important as ML, i should get more fluent with our infra and systems.
• I should always have a moonshot approach, where we aspire to be. Slowly iterate towards that goal. In that process :)
• Document everything, it helps a great deal in diagnosis.

I’m slowly getting back to Kaggle – Zillow was a failed start. Couldn’t dedicate enough time to get anything substantial done. Currently getting started with a new competition – Predicting car insurance claims in Potro Seguro. Reading up on kernels and discussions, should get underway this week!

I sat through three long reading sessions to complete “Rafa – My Story”, one that had been on my desk for a long time! Even made my weekly vlog on the book, a first amongst my book review vlogs.

I’m gonna try to keep my reading habit rolling, “Flowers for Algernon” next on my desk.

I put in all five days at the gym – slowly getting into the flow, soon i’ll be customizing my workouts to get into a better runners body. Currently focussed on building some muscle to get to a decent level. Went on a Sunday run, my legs are still not perfect – i’ll be going on couple more more runs this week, have to decide whether i am fit to run the Kaveri Trail Marathon in November. Fingers crossed :)

I’m taking the better part of the week off from work, Bombay for Diwali! Excited to get back home, even more excited to get some work done on my ToDos!

That’s it folks! Later.

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