Blue Camel
Data Science & Experimentation

A number you can defend, and an experiment that answers the question you asked.

Your model is in production, and somebody wants to know how much personal information went into it, or why two teams read the same test two different ways. Each of those resolves to a number with its own error bars.

Fifteen years of turning contested numbers into ones a room can act on: product analytics leadership through a marketplace launch at Uber, then metric reliability and training-corpus measurement at a large social platform, with machine learning on clinical text at a hospital research institute before either of those.

A count with no error bars is a guess in a suit. Most of the work is getting the inputs right and then being willing to state, in writing, how confident you actually are.

What we take on

Measurement that survives the question

We put a number in front of legal, or a regulator, or a customer’s security review, and we cannot show our work.

You get a measured answer with its own error bars and a trail somebody can audit, built from a sample that people have checked rather than from a scanner’s raw count. It works on training corpora and on model behaviour, and on anything else where the real answer is a range rather than a point.

Experiments that answer the real question

We ran a test. Now two teams read the same result two different ways.

Sample sizes worked out properly rather than by eye, and a free-rider measure on every incentive test, because that is the question finance asks eventually. Nothing runs on real money until it has been backtested against held-out actuals.

Data that ties out

Nobody trusts the numbers. We find out something broke when a customer tells us.

It starts with the unglamorous half: grain, nulls, reconciliation and tie-outs. The operating discipline goes on top of that, covering which metrics matter, what bound each one has, who gets woken up and what the runbook tells them to do. Most of the value is in the first half.

See it running

Selected work

Start a conversation

One measurement problem, named in a sentence, is enough to start. Write to [email protected] with two or three sentences on what you are facing. If it is a fit, the reply usually includes a first artifact, not a meeting request.

Email Blue Camel Open the drift monitor demo

The drift monitor runs in a browser on synthetic data, with no signup. It is the shape of thing an engagement hands over.

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