#data-science

How we knew COVID was over (and what our models had to unlearn)

When we retrain, when we rebuild, and when we leave a model alone. By: Harrison Katz A forecast that carries weight The Forecasting Data Science team at Airbnb produces many of the forecasts the rest of the company plans around: demand, bookings, cancellations, and a range of finer cuts by market and segment, refreshed continuously across thousands of markets. The targets differ, and the models differ, but they have one thing in common: Other teams build on top of them. This means a forecast that is casually wrong is not a clean miss, as it might be in an academic setting. That’s because a sma

The Airbnb Tech Blog - Medium · EN

Beyond the model: Engineering AI infra with scientific judgement

How Airbnb’s agent harness transforms unstructured data exploration by encoding scientific methodology into scalable, reproducible, and audit-ready infrastructure. By : Wren Dougherty Ask a coding agent to analyze 100,000 customer support conversations and within minutes you’ll have a polished taxonomy, precise prevalence numbers, and an executive-ready summary. What you can’t see is the investigation that produced them: the methods it chose, the evidence it weighed, how much to trust it, or whether a second request would agree. All that reaches you is the polish. The model is undeniably intel

The Airbnb Tech Blog - Medium · EN

Making Failure Diagnosis Reliable with Pensive AI

By Praneeth Yenugutala , Victor Dusa , Anastasia Samoilova , Megan Ren , Justin Wei , Marcelo Mayworm At Netflix, data and machine learning practitioners run millions of workloads each day across orchestration systems and compute engines such as Titus, Spark, Trino, and Druid. On peak days, roughly 100,000 workloads fail. When workloads fail, the failure itself is only the beginning. Someone still needs to find the useful signal in several logs, decide whether the cause sits in their code or the platform, and determine whether to retry, reconfigure, or escalate. Even a small share of difficult

Netflix Tech Blog · EN