Senior Data Scientist, Data Mettle

Three questions for Ying

What has your career looked like to date?

After completing my PhD in Applied Mathematics in 2015, I joined the National Australia Bank as a quantitative analyst. My work was initially in the area of operational risk. I worked on a statistical model calculating the capital the bank was required to hold to protect against the risk of losses resulting from operational risk events.

Within the same company, I later on moved to a role in credit risk, working on a loss-given-default model, quantifying the credit risk for non-retail loans. My responsibilities were largely programming in R and SQL to build the models, stress test the models and automate various reporting. My skills in probability, statistics and mathematical programming, gained from years of study in Mathematics, were a vital part of these roles.

In 2018, I joined Zen Energy, picking up new knowledge in the electricity industry and developing demand forecasting models, eventually implementing these models on cloud platforms. This work led to my next role as a senior data scientist at Data Mettle, a start up consulting company.

What do you do in your current position?

In my current position, I work on a diverse range of analytics and data science projects, including natural language processing models, predictive models, and time series forecasting.

How has your mathematics/statistics training been useful in your career?

My degree has honed my problem solving capability, helping me to tackle many different analytical topics in a fast-paced environment, and to think critically about both mathematical and business problems.