applied-ml
Curated papers, articles, and blogs on data science & machine learning in production. ⚙️

Figuring out how to implement your ML project? Learn how other organizations did it:
- How the problem is framed 🔎(e.g., personalization as recsys vs. search vs. sequences)
- What machine learning techniques worked ✅ (and sometimes, what didn't ❌)
- Why it works, the science behind it with research, literature, and references 📂
- What real-world results were achieved (so you can better assess ROI ⏰💰📈)
P.S., Want a summary of ML advancements? 👉ml-surveys
P.P.S, Looking for guides and interviews on applying ML? 👉applyingML
Table of Contents
- Data Quality
- Data Engineering
- Data Discovery
- Feature Stores
- Classification
- Regression
- Forecasting
- Recommendation
- Search & Ranking
- Embeddings
- Natural Language Processing
- Sequence Modelling
- Computer Vision
- Reinforcement Learning
- Anomaly Detection
- Graph
- Optimization
- Information Extraction
- Weak Supervision
- Generation
- Audio
- Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning
- Validation and A/B Testing
- Model Management
- Efficiency
- Ethics
- Infra
- MLOps Platforms
- Practices
- Team Structure
- Fails
Data Quality
- Reliable and Scalable Data Ingestion at Airbnb
Airbnb 2016
- Monitoring Data Quality at Scale with Statistical Modeling
Uber 2017
- Data Management Challenges in Production Machine Learning (Paper)
Google 2017
- Automating Large-Scale Data Quality Verification (Paper)
Amazon 2018
- Meet Hodor — Gojek’s Upstream Data Quality Tool
Gojek 2019
- Data Validation for Machine Learning (Paper)
Google 2019
- An Approach to Data Quality for Netflix Personalization Systems
Netflix 2020
- Improving Accuracy By Certainty Estimation of Human Decisions, Labels, and Raters (Paper)
Facebook 2020
Data Engineering
- Zipline: Airbnb’s Machine Learning Data Management Platform
Airbnb 2018
- Sputnik: Airbnb’s Apache Spark Framework for Data Engineering
Airbnb 2020
- Unbundling Data Science Workflows with Metaflow and AWS Step Functions
Netflix 2020
- How DoorDash is Scaling its Data Platform to Delight Customers and Meet Growing Demand
DoorDash 2020
- Revolutionizing Money Movements at Scale with Strong Data Consistency
Uber 2020
- Zipline - A Declarative Feature Engineering Framework
Airbnb 2020
- Automating Data Protection at Scale, Part 1 (Part 2)
Airbnb 2021
- Real-time Data Infrastructure at Uber
Uber 2021
- Introducing Fabricator: A Declarative Feature Engineering Framework
DoorDash 2022
- Functions & DAGs: introducing Hamilton, a microframework for dataframe generation
Stitch Fix 2021
- Optimizing Pinterest’s Data Ingestion Stack: Findings and Learnings
Pinterest 2022
- Lessons Learned From Running Apache Airflow at Scale
Shopify 2022
- Understanding Data Storage and Ingestion for Large-Scale Deep Recommendation Model Training
Meta 2022
- Data Mesh — A Data Movement and Processing Platform @ Netflix
Netflix 2022
- Building Scalable Real Time Event Processing with Kafka and Flink
DoorDash 2022
Data Discovery
- Apache Atlas: Data Goverance and Metadata Framework for Hadoop (Code)
Apache
- Collect, Aggregate, and Visualize a Data Ecosystem's Metadata (Code)
WeWork
- Discovery and Consumption of Analytics Data at Twitter
Twitter 2016
- Democratizing Data at Airbnb
Airbnb 2017
- Databook: Turning Big Data into Knowledge with Metadata at Uber
Uber 2018
- Metacat: Making Big Data Discoverable and Meaningful at Netflix (Code)
Netflix 2018
- Amundsen — Lyft’s Data Discovery & Metadata Engine
Lyft 2019
- Open Sourcing Amundsen: A Data Discovery And Metadata Platform (Code)
Lyft 2019
- DataHub: A Generalized Metadata Search & Discovery Tool (Code)
LinkedIn 2019
- Amundsen: One Year Later
Lyft 2020
- Using Amundsen to Support User Privacy via Metadata Collection at Square
Square 2020
- Turning Metadata Into Insights with Databook
Uber 2020
- DataHub: Popular Metadata Architectures Explained
LinkedIn 2020
- How We Improved Data Discovery for Data Scientists at Spotify
Spotify 2020
- How We’re Solving Data Discovery Challenges at Shopify
Shopify 2020
- Nemo: Data discovery at Facebook
Facebook 2020
- Exploring Data @ Netflix (Code)
Netflix 2021
Feature Stores
- Distributed Time Travel for Feature Generation
Netflix 2016
- Building the Activity Graph, Part 2 (Feature Storage Section)
LinkedIn 2017
- Fact Store at Scale for Netflix Recommendations
Netflix 2018
- Zipline: Airbnb’s Machine Learning Data Management Platform
Airbnb 2018
- Feature Store: The missing data layer for Machine Learning pipelines?
Hopsworks 2018
- Introducing Feast: An Open Source Feature Store for Machine Learning (Code)
Gojek 2019
- Michelangelo Palette: A Feature Engineering Platform at Uber
Uber 2019
- The Architecture That Powers Twitter's Feature Store
Twitter 2019
- Accelerating Machine Learning with the Feature Store Service
Condé Nast 2019
- Feast: Bridging ML Models and Data
Gojek 2020
- Building a Scalable ML Feature Store with Redis, Binary Serialization, and Compression
DoorDash 2020
- Rapid Experimentation Through Standardization: Typed AI features for LinkedIn’s Feed
LinkedIn 2020
- Building a Feature Store
Monzo Bank 2020
- Butterfree: A Spark-based Framework for Feature Store Building (Code)
QuintoAndar 2020
- Building Riviera: A Declarative Real-Time Feature Engineering Framework
DoorDash 2021
- Optimal Feature Discovery: Better, Leaner Machine Learning Models Through Information Theory
Uber 2021
- ML Feature Serving Infrastructure at Lyft
Lyft 2021
- Near real-time features for near real-time personalization
LinkedIn 2022
- Building the Model Behind DoorDash’s Expansive Merchant Selection
DoorDash 2022
- Open sourcing Feathr – LinkedIn’s feature store for productive machine learning
LinkedIn 2022
- Evolution of ML Fact Store
Netflix 2022
- Developing scalable feature engineering DAGs
Metaflow + Hamilton via Outerbounds 2022
- Feature Store Design at Constructor
Constructor.io 2023
Classification
- Prediction of Advertiser Churn for Google AdWords (Paper)
Google 2010
- High-Precision Phrase-Based Document Classification on a Modern Scale (Paper)
LinkedIn 2011
- Chimera: Large-scale Classification using Machine Learning, Rules, and Crowdsourcing (Paper)
Walmart 2014
- Large-scale Item Categorization in e-Commerce Using Multiple Recurrent Neural Networks (Paper)
NAVER 2016
- Learning to Diagnose with LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks (Paper)
Google 2017
- Discovering and Classifying In-app Message Intent at Airbnb
Airbnb 2019
- Teaching Machines to Triage Firefox Bugs
Mozilla 2019
- Categorizing Products at Scale
Shopify 2020
- How We Built the Good First Issues Feature
GitHub 2020
- Testing Firefox More Efficiently with Machine Learning
Mozilla 2020
- Using ML to Subtype Patients Receiving Digital Mental Health Interventions (Paper)
Microsoft 2020
- Scalable Data Classification for Security and Privacy (Paper)
Facebook 2020
- Uncovering Online Delivery Menu Best Practices with Machine Learning
DoorDash 2020
- Using a Human-in-the-Loop to Overcome the Cold Start Problem in Menu Item Tagging
DoorDash 2020
- Deep Learning: Product Categorization and Shelving
Walmart 2021
- Large-scale Item Categorization for e-Commerce (Paper)
DianPing, eBay 2012
- Semantic Label Representation with an Application on Multimodal Product Categorization
Walmart 2022
- Building Airbnb Categories with ML and Human-in-the-Loop
Airbnb 2022
Regression
- Using Machine Learning to Predict Value of Homes On Airbnb
Airbnb 2017
- Using Machine Learning to Predict the Value of Ad Requests
Twitter 2020
- Open-Sourcing Riskquant, a Library for Quantifying Risk (Code)
Netflix 2020
- Solving for Unobserved Data in a Regression Model Using a Simple Data Adjustment
DoorDash 2020
Forecasting
- Engineering Extreme Event Forecasting at Uber with RNN
Uber 2017
- Forecasting at Uber: An Introduction
Uber 2018
- Transforming Financial Forecasting with Data Science and Machine Learning at Uber
Uber 2018
- Under the Hood of Gojek’s Automated Forecasting Tool
Gojek 2019
- BusTr: Predicting Bus Travel Times from Real-Time Traffic (Paper, Video)
Google 2020
- Retraining Machine Learning Models in the Wake of COVID-19
DoorDash 2020
- Automatic Forecasting using Prophet, Databricks, Delta Lake and MLflow (Paper, Code)
Atlassian 2020
- Introducing Orbit, An Open Source Package for Time Series Inference and Forecasting (Paper, Video, Code)
Uber 2021
- Managing Supply and Demand Balance Through Machine Learning
DoorDash 2021
- Greykite: A flexible, intuitive, and fast forecasting library
LinkedIn 2021
- The history of Amazon’s forecasting algorithm
Amazon 2021
- DeepETA: How Uber Predicts Arrival Times Using Deep Learning
Uber 2022
- [Forecasting Grubhub Order Volume At Scale](https://bytes.grubhu