Andrew Burnie
Verified Expert in Engineering
Data Scientist and Machine Learning Developer
London, United Kingdom
Toptal member since July 7, 2020
Andrew is an expert in extracting commercially valuable insights from data, with a specialty in text analysis. He has experience in the retail, insurance, and other financial sectors. Andrew earned a PhD in social media analysis, funded by the UK's national institute for data science and AI, and a master's degree in management and economics from the University of Cambridge. He enjoys using machine learning and statistics to help companies get the most out of their data.
Portfolio
Experience
- Machine Learning - 8 years
- Time Series - 7 years
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) - 5 years
- Python - 5 years
- TensorFlow - 5 years
- Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) - 3 years
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) - 3 years
- Causal Inference - 3 years
Work Experience
Doctoral Student (PhD Completed)
The Alan Turing Institute
- Earned a PhD at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence.
- Created a new, nonparametric NLP algorithm (DDPWI) to extract from social media text the words associated with declining Bitcoin prices. Published in Royal Society Open Science.
- Applied neural networks in a new Word2vec-based topic modeling algorithm to detect which topics discussed on social media were associated with phasic shifts in Bitcoin prices. Presented at ACM SIGIR 2019.
- Showed the one-off effect of regulatory bans on Bitcoin and the recurring effects of rival innovations on the Ether price.
- Demonstrated how nonparametric correlation networks could be applied to explore the associations between the prices of different financial assets. This work has been cited 15 times.
Head of Data Science
ERS (A Lloyd's Syndicate and the UK's Largest Specialist Motor Insurer)
- Set up the data science team at the UK's largest specialist motor insurer with accountability at the board level.
- Enabled the fine-tuning of insurance premiums based on customized, specialized, nonparametric technologies rather than the standard linear models offered by Willis Towers Watson software.
- Pioneered the application of Random Forests, XGBoost, and GLM along with approaches to feature selection that included Random Forest techniques, including Boruta and statistical testing, to generate prediction models.
Data Scientist
Hitachi Consulting
- Introduced regression approaches (linear, lasso, ridge, elastic net, and logistic) to feature selection to improve the customer experience by transforming data into actionable insights.
- Identified potential root causes of sales revenue in a marketing project using machine learning feature selection approaches.
- Developed data science project templates used in machine learning and customer analytics projects.
Data Scientist
Model Citizens Ltd
- Managed customer data analysis identifying opportunities and threats for a retailer.
- Performed a data audit and analysis for an entertainment company.
- Pioneered the use of clustering algorithms to classify customers into different types.
Postgraduate Student
Grenoble École de Management
- Analyzed the financial and nonfinancial drivers of internet company valuations.
- Determined that financial statements could explain only about one-third of the variation in the price-to-sales ratio.
- Published in the journal, Bankers, Markets & Investors.
Internship
DN Capital
- Advised DN Capital on the threats and opportunities facing the European venture capital market.
- Provided guidance to DN Capital on how best to position itself to mitigate threats and take advantage of opportunities.
- Published a report that was awarded a First Class Degree by the University of Cambridge.
Project History
Causal Inference Framework for Extracting Insights from Social Media Text
Education
PhD in Computer Science
University College London (UCL) - London, England, United Kingdom
Master of Arts Degree in Management Studies and Economics
University of Cambridge - Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Master of Science Degree in Finance
Grenoble École de Management - London, England, United Kingdom
Bachelor of Arts Degree in Management Studies and Economics
University of Cambridge - Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Certifications
Rasa Certified Chatbot Developer
Rasa
HackerRank Gold for Java
HackerRank
HackerRank Gold for Python
HackerRank
Sequence Models
deeplearning.ai | via Coursera
Neural Networks and Deep Learning
deeplearning.ai | via Coursera
Machine Learning Specialization
University of Washington | via Coursera
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Social Media APIs, SpaCy, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), Scikit-learn, SciPy, TensorFlow, NumPy, Pandas, REST APIs, Keras, Tidyverse, XGBoost
Tools
Gensim, Azure Machine Learning, Plotly, IBM Watson
Languages
Python, JavaScript, R, SQL, Julia, Java
Storage
JSON
Frameworks
Selenium, Azure Bot Framework
Platforms
Azure, Linux, Windows, CB Insights
Industry Expertise
Marketing, Insurance
Other
Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Topic Modeling, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Causal Inference, Asset Valuation, Cryptocurrency, Linear Regression, Random Forests, Statistical Analysis, Big Data, Data Science, Text Analytics, Web Scraping, Fintech, Consulting, Time Series, Deep Learning, Algorithms, Sentiment Analysis, NLU, Chatbots, Microsoft Azure, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), APIs, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Cloud Platforms, Document Processing, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Custom BERT, Full-stack, Web App UI, Statistics, Predictive Modeling, Generalized Linear Model (GLM), Boruta, Regression, Customer Analytics, Pitch Books, Chatbot Conversation Design, IBM Watson Assistant
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