Konrad Banachewicz

Lead Data Scientist, eBay Classifieds Group

Konrad holds a PhD in statistics from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. During his period in academia, he focused on problems of extreme dependency modeling in credit risk. Starting from vintage statistics, he slowly moved towards data mining and machine learning (this was before the terms 'data science' or 'big data' became ubiquitous). In the decade and a half since his PhD, Konrad worked in a variety of financial institutions on a wide array of quantitative data analysis problems. In the process, he became an expert on the entire lifetime of a data product cycle: from translating business requirements ('what do they really need'), through data acquisition ('spreadsheets and flat files? really?'), wrangling, modeling and testing (the actually fun part), all the way to presenting the results to people allergic to mathematical terminology. He has visited different ends of the frequency spectrum in finance, predicted potato prices and analyzed anomalies in performance of large scale industrial equipment. As a person who himself stood on the shoulders of giants, Konrad believes in sharing the knowledge with others: it is very important to know how to approach practical problems with data science methods, but also how not to do it. Konrad seems addicted to data analysis, so in his spare time he competes on Kaggle ('the home of data science').