This is my third startup. Or maybe my fourth, I’m not sure but it gets hazy after a while. What I do know is that if I ever do another startup, I’ll use open source to make it happen. Let me explain with a bit of back history. My most recent startup was a consulting business that I started in mid 2017. I had just resigned from another startup in the machine learning space and with their software I did Data Science and Engineering consulting for a handful of clients. As luck would have it an opportunity at H2O.ai came a long and I closed down my consultancy to come on board there. There was another, rather short lived startup during that time centered around autonomous drones that never quite got off the ground. Pun intended. ...

Writing. I have such a love hate relationship with it. I try to write things of interest to my readers but I’m struggling to reconcile what to write about it. So I focus on writing tips and the process. I love the process of writing so much that it gets in the way of actual writing sometimes. Damn. In order to share with my readers, I have to write. In order to write, I have to sit my butt in a chair and start writing. This was something I used to do it religiously back in 2007 to 2010. I would write a post every morning, mostly on the markets and applying machine learning to predict the stock market. I had a routine and it served me well. I’m slowly easing back into that routine. It’s quite simple. My preferred method is wake up at 5:30AM, make some coffee, and put fingers to keyboard. If all goes well, I’ll have a rough draft of a post ready to go before the entire house wakes up for the day. For years I fell out of that routine and I think I became dumber for it. I made all kinds of excuses but the problem was really me. Hell, I’m loathe to say that I blamed my writing utensils as well! My computer was too slow! My laptop was too heavy. You get the picture. ...

Ray Dalio’s Pure Alpha Fund returned 14.6% for 2018. That’s an amazing feat considering the majority of hedge funds averaged a loss of 6.7%. How does he do it? Simple. He always asks, “how do I know I’m right?” The Westport, Connecticut-based firm is the world’s biggest hedge fund with about $160 billion in assets. The gains for its Pure Alpha Strategy came as other fund managers were whipsawed by volatile markets, resulting in the industry posting one of its worst years ever. Via Bloomberg ...

I’m going to preface this post by saying that lately I’ve been pretty emotional. I’m not sure why, but perhaps it has to do with the fact that in a few short years I’ll be a half century old. I’m starting to look around me and catch glimpses of my mortality in the rear view mirror. Oddly, it seems to be gaining on me every time I look. For those that know me, I have a favorite saying. When I’m asked “how’re you doing?” I reply, “I’m living the dream.” Sometimes I get a chuckle, sometimes I get a sigh, and sometimes I get “Yah right, more like a nightmare.” I’ve come to find that I can learn a lot about a person by how they answer this question. ...

Dear Friend, I’ve been meaning to write about the importance humility and equanimity in sales. From my personal past observations, it seems these are attributes only a few sales people have. What is humility and equanimity? Humility is defined as: “a modest or low view of one’s own importance; humbleness.” Equanimity is defined as: “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.” The Monkey Brain Recently I was enlightened by a sales colleague about the concept of the Monkey brain. It was from a book he read. ...

Overfitting and introducing bias during model training is always a big topic in data science. Typically you train a model using Cross Validation by creating a model on k-1 folds and test it on the remaining one fold. This one fold is the holdout set and will usually work very well if, and only if, the trained model is independent of the holdout set. Under normal situations, this works well, but you might begin to leak information into the model as the test fold changes. The observations in the first test will be different in the second BUT some observations in the first test set will now be in training set. This creates an opportunity to ’leak’ information into the model. ...

Dear Friend, I’ve been think a lot about open source lately. I’ve also been thinking of closed source and open core too. All those words. What do they mean? Why does it sound so important and confusing at the same time? Selling AI I’m back in sales now and you can say that I sell ‘AI’. What a strange thing to say, sell AI. I help sell support and Driverless AI. ...

In this video the presenter goes over a new R package called ‘iML.’ This package has a lot of power when explaining global and local feature importance. These explanations are critical, especially in the health field and if your under GDPR regulations. Now, with the combination of Shapley, LIME, and partial dependence plots, you can figure out how the model works and why. I think we’ll see a lot of innovation in the ‘model interpretation’ space going forward. ...

For those that are wondering why I left RapidMiner, my dream job, there are no gory details to share. The simple reason is I got burnt out. My time at RapidMiner was some of the best learning and growth years in my entire professional career. I solved problems, made presentations to C-suite people, and worked with some of the best talent. The flipside of this was that it wasn’t easy and it sure as hell wasn’t a smooth ride. I worked through some of the most tumultuous years at RapidMiner. We had 3 years of management changes and radical 180 degree strategy changes while I was there. All this ‘chaos’ eventually took it’s toll on me. ...

One of my first clients at RapidMiner was Marco. He bought RapidMiner Server from us to build dashboards and do a lot of ETL for his company in Mexico. In fact, I think he was our first Latin American customer. I helped me build the dashboards and troubleshoot problems. We met about three years ago at RapidMiner Wisdom. I didn’t have a lot of time to catch up with him there but we managed to get this picture together (Ingo is in there too). Then he promptly got snowed in and stayed a few days longer in the Big Apple. ...