Robert Chang – Medium

Published in The Airbnb Tech Blog

·Apr 30, 2021

How Airbnb Achieved Metric Consistency at Scale

Part-I: Introducing Minerva — Airbnb’s Metric Platform — By: Amit Pahwa, Cristian Figueroa, Donghan Zhang, Haim Grosman, John Bodley, Jonathan Parks, Maggie Zhu, Philip Weiss, Robert Chang, Shao Xie, Sylvia Tomiyama, Xiaohui Sun Introduction At Airbnb, we lean on data to inform our critical decisions. We validate product ideas through randomized controlled experiments, and we track our business performance…

Data Science

12 min read

How Airbnb Achieved Metric Consistency at Scale

Data Science

12 min read

Mar 29, 2020

How I Build Learning Projects — Part II

Habits Are Too Light To Be Felt Until They Are Too Heavy to Be Broken — Recap In my earlier post, I shared my approach to building self-directed learning projects. I emphasized, before jumping into any project, you should pick carefully and strategically what skills to invest in. …

Data Science

14 min read

Data Science

14 min read

Jul 21, 2019

How I Build Learning Projects — Part I

A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For A Lot of Y-Intercept — Motivation Recently, I came across a blog post written by Simon Hørup Eskildsen on how he approaches reading. It was an inspiring read because I did not know anyone this deliberate about the pursuit of reading. This kind of meticulous, thoughtful, system-level design thinking reminds me of Ray Dalio’s Principle: Think…

Data Science

14 min read

Data Science

14 min read

Published in Deliberate Data Science

·Feb 21, 2019

So You Want to Become a Data Science Manager?

How to think about the IC to Management transition — Motivation I recently came across a great book called “The Manager’s Path”, written by Camille Fournier. In this book, Camille describes the possible career paths of a technical individual contributor (IC) as one continues to grow in her career. I find this book illuminating because it touches on a rather common…

Leadership

7 min read

So You Want Become a Data Science Manager?

Leadership

7 min read

Sep 26, 2018

Getting Better at Machine Learning

Moving Beyond model.fit(X, y) — Motivation In A Beginner’s Guide to Data Engineering series, I argued that academic institutions typically do not teach students the proper mental models when it comes to analytics workflows in real-life. Far too many classes only focus on the mechanics of data analysis without teaching concepts such as ETL or the…

Machine Learning

16 min read

Machine Learning

16 min read

Jun 24, 2018

A Beginner’s Guide to Data Engineering — The Series Finale

From ETL Pipelines To Data Engineering Frameworks — At Last, The Finale From Part I of this series, we learned that a robust data foundation is an important prerequisite for pursuing analytics, be it business intelligence, experimentation, or machine learning. From Part II, we delved deeply into the specifics of Airflow and discussed techniques such as data modeling, star schema, and normalization…

Data Science

12 min read

A Beginner’s Guide to Data Engineering — The Series Finale

Data Science

12 min read

Feb 20, 2018

A Beginner’s Guide to Data Engineering — Part II

Data Modeling, Data Partitioning, Airflow, and ETL Best Practices — Recapitulation In A Beginner’s Guide to Data Engineering — Part I, I explained that an organization’s analytics capability is built layers upon layers. From collecting raw data and building data warehouses to applying Machine Learning, we saw why data engineering plays a critical role in all of these areas. One of…

Data Science

12 min read

A Beginner’s Guide to Data Engineering — Part II

Data Science

12 min read

Jan 8, 2018

A Beginner’s Guide to Data Engineering — Part I

Data Engineering: The Close Cousin of Data Science — Motivation The more experienced I become as a data scientist, the more convinced I am that data engineering is one of the most critical and foundational skills in any data scientist’s toolkit. I find this to be true for both evaluating project or job opportunities and scaling one’s work on the…

Data Science

14 min read

A Beginner’s Guide to Data Engineering — Part I

Data Science

14 min read

Oct 8, 2017

Advice For New and Junior Data Scientists

What I Would Have Told Myself a Few Years ago — Motivation Two years ago, I shared my experience on doing data science in the industry. …

Data Science

13 min read

Advice For New and Junior Data Scientists

Data Science

13 min read

Published in The Airbnb Tech Blog

·Jul 17, 2017

Using Machine Learning to Predict Value of Homes On Airbnb

by Robert Chang Introduction Data products have always been an instrumental part of Airbnb’s service. However, we have long recognized that it’s costly to make data products. For example, personalized search ranking enables guests to more easily discover homes, and smart pricing allows hosts to set more competitive prices according to…

Machine Learning

9 min read

Machine Learning

9 min read