top of page
ALVIRA SWALIN

About Me

As an engineering student at IIT Bombay, I was always fascinated with mathematics and problem-solving. It was my final year project on Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem and then my first job at ICICI Bank, where I was trying to understand human behavior using transactional data, which proved to be the tipping point and made me choose Data science as a career path. I have done my Masters in Data Science from the University of San Francisco and am excited to be a part of Data Science Community. I enjoy applying Mathematical, Statistical and Machine Learning experience to solve complicated data science problems and learn from the rich community. I have prior experience in risk analytics, portfolio-creation & mathematical modeling. In my free time, I love to blog on Data Science topics.

 

 

 

myimg.jpg

PROJECTS

WEB-APP CAREER PATH FINDER

Created a professional network graph by scraping resumes from Indeed that predicted the most optimal path between two job profiles basis shortest time & minimum transitions in Python. 

MEDIUM BLOGS ANALYSIS

The goal of this project is to scrape the contents of medium blogs and understand the factors impacting the number of claps/likes on medium.com. Scraped the blogs related to data science, technology & programming.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF YELP REVIEWS

Predicted ratings from Yelp reviews using Naïve Bayes classifier. Achieved F1 score of 0.82. Created a distributed Spark ML pipeline on AWS EMR cluster and MongoDB.

CAPACITATED VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM (CVRP)

Optimized the path length and number of vehicles for delivery to multiple locations with demand and time constraints using Monte-Carlo simulations in MATLAB.

BLOGS

CatBoost vs. Light GBM vs. XGBoost

March 13, 2018

I recently participated in this competition (WIDS Datathon by Stanford) where I was able to land up in Top 10 using various boosting algorithms. Since then, I have been very curious about the fine workings of each model including parameter tuning, pros and cons and hence decided to write this blog 

Evaluating Metrics for Machine Learning Models — Part 1

May 02, 2018

Well, in this post, I will be discussing the usefulness of each error metric depending on the objective and the problem we are trying to solve. When someone tells you that “USA is the best country”, the first question that you should ask is on what basis is this statement being made. Are we judging each country on the basis of their economic status, or their health facilities etc.? Similarly each machine learning model is trying to solve a problem with a different objective using a different dataset and hence, it is important to understand the context before choosing a metric

 

Evaluating Metrics for Machine Learning Models — Part 2

May 02, 2018

In the first blog, we discussed some important metrics used in regression, their pros and cons, and use cases. This part will focus on commonly used metrics in classification, why should we prefer some over others with context.

How to Handle Missing Data

January 30, 2018

One of the most common problems I have faced in Data Cleaning/Exploratory Analysis is handling the missing values. Firstly, understand that there is NO good way to deal with missing data. I have come across different solutions for data imputation depending on the kind of problem — Time series Analysis, ML, Regression etc. and it is difficult to provide a general solution. In this blog, I am attempting to summarize the most commonly used methods and trying to find a structural solution.

Please reload

RESEARCH ASSISTANT 
Data Science , USF

April 2018 - Present

Currently working on building a Question-Answering system using Facebook Sentence Embedding for sentence detection given a question & paragraph. Developing a RNN-based model to extract the answer from the sentence.

DATA SCIENCE INTERN
Price (Fx), San Francisco

Nov 2017 - March 2018

Developed a recommendation model using collaborative filtering (matrix factorization and similarity-based methods) for a high dimensional transactional data. 

PROJECT MANAGER - ROBO ADVISORY

ICICI Bank, Mumbai

July 2016 - June 2017

Key-member of the Robo-Advisory team - the online algorithm-based investment platform which has democratized high-quality investment advice to mass affluent and mass retail customers. Liaised with UI/UX designers, mobile platform developers & technology team and collated their inputs for strategic planning of the project
Developed mathematical model for risk profiler and created model portfolio for different risk profiles using the Efficient Frontier methodology.

EXPERIENCE

EDUCATION

Let’s Connect

  • github
  • medium
  • twitter
  • linkedin

Your details were sent successfully!

M.S. IN DATA SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO

July 2017 - June 2018

B.TECH. WITH HONORS IN CHEMICAL ENGINEERING. 
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, BOMBAY

July 2012 - May 2016

bottom of page