All posts tagged with 'data science'
Return of the intern
A year on from my first data science internship at FreeAgent, I’m about to start my second one, and I’m getting ready for my second first day. It’s different this time though. Aside from the fact that I am now a fully fledged graduate (scary!), this internship is going to be based entirely within my living room, as the entire company is now working remotely. I have never worked remotely… Continue reading
Transaction Taxonomy: Spending the Summer Studying SVMs
A company faces some unavoidably arduous tasks when taking control of their finances. One such task, which currently takes up a lot of time for our users, is explaining bank transactions. This is the process of assigning an accounting category to transactions, which is important both for internal reports generated by FreeAgent and for external submissions, for example to HMRC. At the end of June FreeAgent launched a suite of… Continue reading
Starting from Home: Remote Data Science Internship at FreeAgent
Starting a data science internship at FreeAgent was going to be a completely new experience for me and I was super excited. It’s a lovely warm day in Edinburgh, Monday 1st of June, I’m standing in my kitchen looking out of the window and wondering what the next few months will hold for me. It’s 9.28am and my first meeting is supposed to start in 2 minutes. Am I going… Continue reading
Delivering Practice Insights: My internship at FreeAgent
The phrase ‘practice insights’ was something that I heard very often in my first couple of weeks at FreeAgent, between wrapping my head around the data model and trying hard to remember everyone's names. The reason I mention it in the context of the first couple of weeks is because at that point I didn’t fully know what it meant. Of course I knew what the words meant, and I… Continue reading
Deriving and verifying the uncertainty on conversion rate predictions
For the past few weeks I’ve been working on building a machine learning model that can estimate the probability that a customer will convert from the free trial to a paid subscriber. In practice, I combine the predictions from this model for cohorts of companies, which are defined by their acquisition channel and acquisition month, and so a method is required for calculating the conversion rate uncertainties for each cohort.… Continue reading
Being a Data Science Intern at FreeAgent: The first month
As the end of my second year at university was approaching I knew I needed to get some real-world experience to help me get a clearer vision of what career path I want to follow in the future. The best way of achieving this was getting a summer internship. After reading some blog posts of past Interns at FreeAgent (who knew I would be writing one myself a few months… Continue reading
Settling in for summer: my data science internship
The application process After having the fantastic and inevitable university-student-in-their-penultimate-year realisation that I’m almost one year away from graduation and do not feel adequately prepared, I decided that an internship could be a great way to up my experience and knowledge before my final year. Data science, specifically, is what I was looking for as I’m interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and I thought a data science internship… Continue reading
Wondering where the weeks went: a reminiscent reflection of my FreeAgent internship
It just seems like yesterday when I was settling in at FreeAgent and writing a blog about my first week as a FreeAgent data science intern. Yet here I am, having finished my internship and remembering all of the good times I had. Outside of my internship at FreeAgent, I am a PhD student specialising in veterinary biology, so the last 13 weeks have been a steep learning curve into… Continue reading
Accurately ascertaining attitudes: designing unbiased survey questions
It would be great if we knew exactly what our customers thought so that we could adapt our products and improve our performance. However, it isn’t possible to read the minds of our customers, so surveys are a popular alternative to understand their attitudes. Yet, if the answers recorded on surveys don’t truly reflect the attitudes of the customers, how can we really know how to improve? This blog post… Continue reading
Sourcing a suitable sample: understanding selection bias in survey data
During my time at FreeAgent, I have been analysing attitudinal customer survey data to predict their behaviour. Getting to the bottom of how exactly this data was collected has helped me to understand the data and has given me a few ideas about how the data could be collected in the future. This blog focuses on how we choose who is selected to take part in surveys: a process is… Continue reading