Data Science and Databases

Retailers often face supply and demand issues that cause them to miss out on potential sales or tie up a lot of money in overstocked products.

In this article, Toptal Data Scientist Ahmed Khaled explains how retailers can boost revenues and cut costs with sales forecasts backed by artificial intelligence.

Working with non-numerical data can be challenging, even for seasoned data scientists. To make good use of such data, it needs to be transformed. But how?

In this article, Toptal Data Scientist Yaroslav Kopotilov will introduce you to embeddings and demonstrate how they can be used to visualize complex data and make it usable.

TensorFlow is one of the leading tools for training deep learning models. Outside that space, it may seem intimidating and unnecessary, but it has many creative uses—like producing highly effective adversarial input for black-box AI systems.

Web scraping has been around since the early days of the World Wide Web, but scraping modern sites that heavily rely on new technologies is anything but straightforward.

In this article, Toptal Software Developer Neal Barnett demonstrates how you can use Python and Selenium to scrape sites that employ a lot of JavaScript, iframes, and certificates.

Properly used, an SQL database index can be so effective that it might seem like magic. But the following series of exercises will show that underneath, the logic of most SQL indexes—and wielding them correctly—is quite straightforward.

ETL can consolidate data from various sources into an organized, reliable, and usable database. This allows businesses to employ previously unused or underused data to improve their performance.

In this article, Toptal Data Modeling Developer Alexandre Wanderer demonstrates all stages of the ETL process in building a data warehouse.

Pre-trained models are making waves in the deep learning world. Using massive pre-training datasets, these NLP models bring previously unheard-of feats of AI within the reach of app developers.

For those working with AI, the future is certainly exciting. At the same time, there is a general sense that AI suffers from one pesky flaw: AI in its current state can be unpredictably unreliable.

One of the new possibilities offered by Lambda@Edge is the ability to implement server-side A/B testing using Lambdas on CloudFront’s edge servers.

In this article, Toptal Full-stack Developer Georgios Boutsioukis guides you through the process and outlines the pros and cons of A/B testing with Lambda@Edge.

IMDb ratings have genre bias: For example, dramas tend to score higher. Removing common feature bias and keeping unique characteristics, it’s possible to create a new, refined score based on IMDb information.

Cloud architects with the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate qualification are in high demand, with good reason—the AWS exam sets the bar high. What’s the best way to prepare for it?

Tests should keep apps from being flaky. But tests themselves can become flaky—even the most straightforward ones. Here’s how we dove into a problematic test on a PostgreSQL-backed Rails app, and what we uncovered.

Supervised learning is the key to computer vision and deep learning. However, what happens when you don’t have access to large, human-labeled datasets?

In this article, Toptal Computer Vision Developer Urwa Muaz demonstrates the potential of semi-supervised image classification using unlabeled datasets.

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods let us compute samples from a distribution even though we can’t do this relying on traditional methods.

In this article, Toptal Data Scientist Divyanshu Kalra will introduce you to Bayesian methods and Metropolis-Hastings, demonstrating their potential in the field of probabilistic programming.

Migrating in either direction between Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database? Code migration tools, public synonyms, and change management are important to keep in mind.

Migrating in either direction between Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database? This round of pitfalls to avoid includes coverage of sequences, identity columns, and filtered indexes.