altolending

Introduction I’ve always been fascinated by debates—the strategic framing, the sharp retorts, and the carefully timed comebacks. Debates aren’t just entertaining; they’re structured battles of ideas, driven by logic and evidence. Recently, I started wondering: could we replicate that dynamic using AI agents—having them debate each other autonomously, complete with real-time fact-checking and moderation? The […]

Gradient boosting is a cornerstone technique for modeling tabular data due to its speed and simplicity. It delivers great results without any fuss. When you look around you’ll see multiple options like LightGBM, XGBoost, etc. Catboost is one such variant. In this post, we will take a detailed look at this model, explore its inner

I used to avoid time series analysis. Every time I took an online course, I’d see a module titled “Time Series Analysis” with subtopics like Fourier Transforms, autocorrelation functions and other intimidating terms. I don’t know why, but I always found a reason to avoid it. But here’s what I’ve learned: any complex topic becomes

Working with products, we might face a need to introduce some “rules”. Let me explain what I mean by “rules” in practical examples:  Imagine that we’re seeing a massive wave of fraud in our product, and we want to restrict onboarding for a particular segment of customers to lower this risk. For example, we found

For a ML model to be useful it needs to run somewhere. This somewhere is most likely not your local machine. A not-so-good model that runs in a production environment is better than a perfect model that never leaves your local machine. However, the production machine is usually different from the one you developed the

We’ve all been in that moment, right? Staring at a chart as if it’s some ancient script, wondering how we’re supposed to make sense of it all. That’s exactly how I felt when I was asked to explain the AUC for the ROC curve at work recently. Though I had a solid understanding of the

Context Over the years, Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress across a wide range of tasks evolving from simple information retrieval systems to sophisticated agents capable of coding, writing, conducting research, and much more. But despite their capabilities, these models are still largely black boxes. Given an input, they accomplish the task

When you’re about to buy a home, whether you’re an everyday buyer looking for your dream house or a seasoned property investor, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered automated valuation models, or AVMs. These clever tools use massive datasets filled with past property transactions to predict the value of your potential new home. By considering

Also available: A Rust version of this article. Everyone talks about making Python programs faster [1, 2, 3], but what if we pursue the opposite goal? Let’s explore how to make them slower — absurdly slower. Along the way, we’ll examine the nature of computation, the role of memory, and the scale of unimaginably large numbers. Our

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of articles, LinkedIn posts, and marketing materials presenting graph data models from different perspectives. This article will refrain from discussing specific products and instead focus solely on the comparison of RDF (Resource Description Framework) and LPG (Labelled Property Graph) data models. To clarify, there is no mutually