I was recently asked by someone, “What do I need to do to get into Machine Learning and Finance industry?” I told them that I would think about it and get back to them. I have been in many interviews for Machine Learning Engineers and I do have a set of questions that I frequently use to get a feeling for where someone is in their career and where they are hoping to go....

I am on a bit of a quest to bring Mathematical Optimization to the masses, or at least to Software Developers. I often come across problems where people are wanting to find the best plan for their problem but they lack to tools to express the problem. Typically the way this is “solved” is by some domain expert coming up with a laborious heuristic in Excel which involves outrageous amount of copying and pasting....

Previously I described how we can perform Discrete Optimization using the Branch and Bound technique. Today I want to describe another foundational technique for Discrete Optimization, Cutting Planes. Cutting Planes is like the Branch and Bound technique in that it uses a series of LP Relaxations to search for solutions. Where it is different from Branch and Bound is in how it refines the LP Formulations. Branch and Bound would subdivide the solution space by branching on a decision variable and creating two new subproblems....

If you have spent any time with me you will know that I am passionate about Optimization. Now, you may pass this off as a bit of geekiness on my part but the reason I care about Optimization is that it has profound implications for how we care for people. When I get a moment to describe Optimization to someone the way I start off is by saying, “Optimization is the mathematics of caring for people....

One of the reasons that I love F# is that is makes it incredibly easy to model domains. By creating a Domain Model which represents the business domain it becomes relatively easy to create workflows and algorithms which streamline business processes. In this post I show how to create types for a domain which are summable, a feature I use frequently in my work. The Value of Restricting Values When I have to create a new Domain Model one of the first things that I do is define a single case Discriminated Union of decimal for the basic building blocks that I am going to work with (Costs, Items, Sales Rates, Days of Inventory, etc....

I recently attended a training event hosted by Gurobi. For those who don’t know, Gurobi produces one of the best mathematical solvers in the industry. It was a great event and we were able to spend ample time with engineers and experts in the field. Using a mathematical solver requires the ability to formulate models and at this time one of the easiest languages for doing that is Python. Python is a great language for many use cases....

I am a huge fan of Domain Driven Design and I have been trying to apply it more and more. I ran into a problem last week that kept beating me over the head though. I kept using a bottom up approach and kept coming up with terrible solutions. Finally, I took a more outside to in approach which cleaned up the solution. I credit Mark Seemann for the idea to work from the outside in....

One of the things that most attracted me to F# is the ability to accurately model your domain. What first turned me on to this was a talk by Scott Wlaschin on Functional programming design patterns. Scott has a more focused talk on Domain Modeling Made Functional that he did a few years later and a book with the same title. This whole concept was blowing my mind. The idea of modeling your domain such that illegal states are unrepresentable sounds immensely satisfying to me....

The title for this may be a little over the top but it is not far from the truth. I am wanting to show how Units of Measure in F# can protect against some of the most insidious types of errors, mismatched units. One of the most difficult parts of putting together algorithms has been making sure that the Units of Measure for numbers match. For example, you should not be able to add lbs and cm, it doesn’t make sense....

At work I have been tasked with extracting the product description information for several of our products to be used as an import for an external system. Normally I would just write a query for the database to get all of this information but in this case I do not have access to the database directly. Even if I did have it, I am not familiar with the schema so I would rather not have to spend the effort digging into if I do not have to....