48. Emmanuel Ameisen - Beyond the jupyter notebook: how to build data science products

Published: Aug. 26, 2020, 2:57 p.m.

Data science is about much more than jupyter notebooks, because data science problems are about more than machine learning.

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What data should I collect? How good does my model need to be to be \u201cgood enough\u201d to solve my problem? What form should my project take for it to be useful? Should it be a dashboard, a live app, or something else entirely? How do I deploy it? How do I make sure something awful and unexpected doesn\u2019t happen when it\u2019s deployed in production?

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None of these questions can be answered by importing sklearn and pandas and hacking away in a jupyter notebook. Data science problems take a unique combination of business savvy and software engineering know-how, and that\u2019s why Emmanuel Ameisen wrote a book called Building Machine Learning Powered Applications: Going from Idea to Product. Emmanuel is a machine learning engineer at Stripe, and formerly worked as Head of AI at Insight Data Science, where he oversaw the development of dozens of machine learning products.

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Our conversation was focused on the missing links in most online data science education: business instinct, data exploration, model evaluation and deployment.