Podcasts Technology Datacast Episode 27: Feature Engineering with Ben Fowler

Episode 27: Feature Engineering with Ben Fowler

Published: Jan. 24, 2020, 12:50 a.m.

Show Notes:

  • (2:17) Ben talked about his past career working in the golf industry - working at the National Golf Foundation and the PGA of America.
  • (4:12) Ben discussed about his first exposure to machine learning and data science.
  • (5:06) Ben talked about his motivation for pursuing an online Master’s degree in Data Science at Southern Methodist University.
  • (6:02) Ben emphasized the importance of a Data Mining course that he took.
  • (8:12) Ben discussed his job as a Senior Data Scientist at CarePredict, an AI elder care platform that helps senior live independently, economically, and longer.
  • (8:56) Ben shared his thought about data security, the biggest challenge of adopting machine learning in healthcare.
  • (10:38) Ben talked about his next employer JM Family Enterprises, one of the largest companies in the automotive industry.
  • (12:44) Ben walked through the end-to-end model development process to solve various problems of interests in his Data Scientist work at JM Family Enterprises.
  • (14:15) Ben discussed the challenges around feature engineering and model experiments in this process.
  • (18:09) Ben shared information about his current role as Machine Learning Technical Lead at Southeast Toyota Finance.
  • (19:29) Ben talked about his passion to do IC data science work.
  • (22:37) Ben went over different conferences he has been / will be at.
  • (26:03) Ben shared the best practices/techniques/libraries to do efficient feature engineering and feature selection, as presented at Palm Beach Data Science Meetup in September 2018 and PyData Miami in January 2019.
  • (29:27) Ben talked about the importance of doing exploratory data analysis and logging experiments before engaging in any feature engineering / selection work.
  • (32:50) Ben shared his experiments performing data science for Fantasy Football - specifically using machine learning to predict the future performance of players, from his talk at the Palm Beach Data Science Meetup last year.
  • (37:25) Ben talked about his experience using H2O AutoML.
  • (40:07) Ben gave a glimpse of his talks about evaluating traditional and novel feature selection approaches at PyData LA and Strata Data Conf.
  • (51:25) Ben gave his advice for people who are interested in speaking at conferences.
  • (52:29) Ben shared his thoughts about the tech and data community in the greater Miami area.
  • (53:16) Closing Segment.

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