Models That Drive Real-World Decisions, with Josh Wills

We're pleased to welcome Josh Wills, director of data science at Cloudera, to the NYC Data Science meetup.

Like most data scientists, Josh Wills is a phenomenal dancer. Also like most data scientists, he has a weird and ever evolving set of hobbies, and the latest one is credit risk modeling. Not so much the actual modeling of credit risk—more like the study of how credit risk models are developed and deployed into production contexts to make real-world decisions, including everything from data cleansing to model selection to OCC 2011-12 (don't ask). In this talk, Josh will talk about what the modeling process looks like to a data scientist, what we can all learn from the success of credit risk modeling, and what tools we need in order to make the process better.

More about our speaker: Josh is VP of Apache Crunch and one of the main contributors to the Crunch project. He has an M.S.E. in operations research from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.S. in mathematics from Duke University. Before joining Cloudera, Josh worked as a software engineer at Google. He tweets, too: @josh_wills (http://twitter.com/josh_wills)