As the saying goes, retail is detail and to be successful in retail analytics, one needs to get many small things right. There is no one big simple idea in retail to guide us — marketing mix modelling comes close as a unifying analytical framework but there are still many facets that it doesn’t cover — … More How to Think About Retail Analytics
The book A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith provides a succinct description of the common denominators of financial euphoria, illustrated beautifully with actual euphoric episodes through the ages. The following are some key points to help us recognise such speculative episodes: Uniformly in all financial euphoria there is the thought that … More A Mental Model of Financial Euphoria
The book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki is probably the worst book of the personal-finance genre I have ever read, containing numerous bad advice and generally encouraging hubris instead of prudence in financial decision-making (in the name of entrepreneurism). I did, however, pick up one useful lesson from it: In finance, you need to … More Quality Financial Journalism: A List
Everyone with a rudimentary understanding of text analytics knows about term-frequency-inverse-document-frequency (TF-IDF) vectors. What is less known but deserve to be more widely appreciated and applied is a little related trick called Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) introduced by E. Gabrilovish and S. Markovitch, for which they were awarded the 2014 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize. (https://www.jair.org/bestpaper.html) ESA … More From Words to Concepts: Explicit Semantic Analysis
As part of a broader data science project, I recently had the chance to undertake a digitisation project to augment the structured dataset we have for analysis. The project turned out to be quite instructive and I came away with a few lessons, lessons I hope to share in this blog piece. The actual digitisation problem is … More A Digitisation Project: Fun with Tesseract
Unifying logic and probability is an active and ongoing research topic of great interest to many. There are many proposals of probabilistic logics in the literature, each with a different motivation, either computational or philosophical, and a different system of syntax and semantics. This state of affairs is confusing and not satisfactory, especially in view … More Unifying Logic and Probability for Learning
When I was building the Data Science Centre of Excellence at Reliance Industries, I once interviewed a world-class researcher who has worked at multiple institutions, including Yahoo and Google, and he told me something I didn’t understand till then. I thought a company like Google has a weak business moat because it is vulnerable to … More The Competitive Moat of Google, Facebook and Other Data Owners
Much has been written about the merits of passive index investing using Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). Even for active value investors, I believe there is sometimes a place for ETF investing for people wishing to move into a new market, possibly just outside their circle of competence, in a low-risk fashion. The way I think about … More ETF Investing using Shiller’s CAPEs
Here is a short (and somewhat unusual) course on statistical machine learning that I have delivered multiple times over the last few years. Introduction to Statistical Learning Theory Bayesian Probability Theory Sequence Prediction and Data Compression Bayesian Networks In designing this course, I have deliberately steered away from the usual practice of giving students a (long) … More A Short Course on Statistical Learning
A major deficiency in many university-level computer science programs is neglect for training in fundamental mathematical skills. This deficiency usually rears its head when a CS student first move into an area like Data Science and quickly realise s/he does not even have the ability to fully understand papers and books in the field, let alone contribute … More How to Prove It
Mental Models 4 Life 