Purpose of this Blog

To those of you who may stumble upon this blog, I want to describe the purpose of it.  First let me introduce myself.  At the time of this writing, I am a Senior Data Scientist at Carvana (an online retailer of used cars) and focus on vehicle purchasing analytics.  I also created and run a business called Price Monster that provides automatic/dynamic pricing analytics for the self-storage industry.  I've also spend about a decade of my career working in various large manufacturing companies including GE and Canadian Solar almost always working in manufacturing quality.  This gave me a heavy dose of Six Sigma training and the statistics understanding that comes with it.  Even before joining GE, while getting my masters degree in mechanical engineering, I was fascinated by the power of various methods of learning from data, especially design of experiments and optimization methods. 


The more I climbed the corporate ladder, the more I realized that I missed the awe and excitement that came from gleaning something important and powerful out of data that nobody could see before.  I realized that I love to use the data generated from real life processes to create software/programs that help the organizations "see" what is really happening, and help them react to the issues that really matter.  Being able to create this type of understanding is limited by the types of data analysis techniques one knows.  The more I learn about data mining and associated topics, the more I want to understand all of the data analysis options that are out there so I can pull the right tool from the toolbox when the time comes to analyze a particularly tricky data set.  That is what this blog is about.


I plan to use this blog to document what I am learning as I take various online courses, read books, and do research on the subject of data mining.  I plan to make my posts simple.  Having read some of the papers and taken some classes on the subject already, there are plenty of PhD's out there that teach at the level of their understanding.  It may be easy for them to understand, but it doesn't make it clear for the rest of us.  This blog is going to be my personal solution for that problem.  I hope it helps me...and you. ;)