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# Specialized Deep Learning Architectures for Time Series Forecasting

Introduction Why Should We Use Deep Learning for Forecasting? Statistical algorithms have long been widely used for making forecasts with time series data. These classical algorithms, like Exponential Smoothing, and ARIMA models, prescribe the data generation process and require manual selections to account for factors like the trend, seasonality, and auto-correlation. However, modern data applications often deal with hundreds or millions of related time series. For example, a demand forecasting algorithm at Amazon may have to consider sales data from millions of products, and an engagement forecasting algorithm at Instagram may have to model metrics from millions of posts.

# Statistical vs Machine Learning vs Deep Learning Modeling for Time Series Forecasting

Over recent decades, Machine Learning (ML) and, its subdomain, Deep Learning (DL) based algorithms have achieved remarkable success in various areas, such as image processing, natural language understanding, and speech recognition. However, ML algorithms haven’t quite had the same widely known and unquestionable superiority when it comes to forecasting applications in the time series domain. While ML algorithms have to overcome the challenges in modeling the non-i.i.d. nature of data inherent in the time series domain, statistical models excel in this setting and provide explicit means to model time series structural elements, such as trend and seasonality.

# Recommender Systems for Modeling Feature Interactions under Sparse Settings

Many machine learning domains, such as recommender systems, targeted advertisement, search ranking, and text analysis contain highly sparse data because of the large categorical variable domains. This sparsity makes it hard for ML algorithms to model second-order and above feature interactions. In this article, I summarize the need for modeling feature interactions and introduce some of the most popular ML architectures designed for estimating interactions from sparse data. Introduction Problem with sparse inputs A variety of Information Retrieval and Data Mining tasks, such as Recommender Systems, Targeted Advertising, Search Ranking, etc.

# Collaborative Filtering based Recommender Systems for Implicit Feedback Data

Different Flavors of Recommenders At a high-level, Recommender systems work based on two different strategies (or a hybrid of the two) for recommending content. Collaborative Filtering: Algorithms that use usage data, such as explicit or implicit feedback from the user. Content-based Filtering: Algorithms that use content metadata and user profile. For example, a movie can be profiled based on its genre, IMDb ratings, box-office sales, etc., and a user can be profile based on their demographic information or their answers to an onboarding survey.

# Comparing NoSQL Models: A Guide for Selecting the Best-fitting Database Model

In the last article, I did a literature review defining the origin of SQL, NoSQL, and NewSQL. I also went over the important theorems and properties that could help in the categorization and comparison of the different types of databases. If you haven’t read that article yet, I highly recommend you to go over it: SQL vs NoSQL vs NewSQL: An In-depth Literature Review. In this article, we will build upon those concepts and learn how to categorize NoSQL databases based on the type of data we intend to store.

# SQL vs NoSQL vs NewSQL: An In-depth Literature Review

SQL Databases Origin The concept of Relational Databases was originally developed in the 1970s by IBM 1. They are also known as SQL (Structured Query Language) databases, named after the query language used for managing data in Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS). Over multiple years of research and development, an unmatched level of reliability, stability, and strong mechanisms to store and query data have been baked into Relational Databases. They have been the storage of choice for a majority of transactional data management applications such as banking, airline reservation, online e-commerce, and supply chain management applications.