November 17, 2022 — Presentation by Abhy Vytheeswara

Reducing Feature Dimensionality

Moving towards a technical leadership role is not an easy path. It is particularly challenging for women as they more often fall prey to imposter The model we use to predict the probability that a user will click on a given impression is the bread and butter of ad targeting at Yelp. We’ve developed various models over the years including logistic regression, gradient-boosted decision trees, and most recently, neural networks. This talk will focus on a certain set of features we’ve been using in our gradient-boosted tree model that target encodes categorical information. We will then discuss other options to reduce feature dimensionality, and end with a brief overview to the future of these features in the NN model we’ve started development on.

Speaker — Abhy Vytheeswaran

Abhy is a machine learning engineer on the Ad Targeting team at Yelp. She joined as an intern prior to joining full time. In her four years in the ads org, Abhy has worked on both the data backend and infra as well as the machine learning models that predict the likelihood of clicks and leads for sponsored search results.

Moderator — Jason MacIntyre

Jason is a technical sourcer with the TechTalent Team at Yelp. Jason has worked both on the product side and engineering side of recruitment. His passions revolve around helping others, art, music, travel, business, and technology.

About Yelping From Home:

Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses, and two of the teams working behind the scenes to make that happen are our five star engineering and product teams.

Playing an active role in our community is a value that we have strongly prioritized over the years. Typically we would invite you to come to Yelp’s HQ to network, grab a slice of ‘za, and learn about the technology and culture behind Yelp. With stay-at-home orders across the globe, Yelp (like many of you) has had no choice but to adapt to these changes. We understand that this is a strange and challenging time for many, so we’d like to invite you to join us as we navigate this new normal for the tech community together.

To stay connected, create space for folks to collaborate and share some of the things Yelp has been working on, we are launching our very own virtual tech talk series. This series of talks will feature Yelp employees from engineering and product share their stories about career development, technical skills and workplace challenges in a well-distributed environment.