Data Science How to know if your recommendations algorithm is actually doing a good job I led the team that built Channel 4’s recommender system for All 4 in 2016. It started out as a straightforward project. But after getting lost in a rabbit hole trying to devise a score for ‘provocativeness’ and ‘serendipity’, I learned the single most important lesson about data science.
Data Science How to build a model that performs at chance I’m going to tell you about a horrible screwup. Not my first and not my last, but a happy one, because although it was excruciating it was also instructive.