[Blog] Quantitative researcher Dr.Damien Passemier joins Measurable AI as Chief Data Scientist!
After obtaining his PhD in Statistics in France, Damien got a 2 years postdoctoral position at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. During his research years, he published several papers on the topic of the Random Matrix theory. After that, he worked as a Data Scientist in several companies, including a horse racing betting syndicate and a hedge fund. Damien now joins Measurable’s team as the Chief Data Scientist.
Let’s hear his story!
1. Tell us about your story with Math
Ever since I can remember, I have always had a passion for Mathematics. Despite being a small country, France has a significant amount of famous matheßmaticians (Descartes, Legendre, Fourrier, Cauchy to name a few), so it seems that I was in the right place! So after high school, I joined the University to study Mathematics. There are a lot of different fields, and I chose to specialize in Probability and Statistics because it’s one of the fields in which you find the most direct applications in “real” life.
What I like in Mathematics is that it is a matter of rigor and systematic reasoning: you prove a theorem using only certain assumptions (axioms), and thus a theorem is always correct. A mathematical statement is either right or wrong, there is no middle ground.
2. Any advice for people who want to start a career in data science?
I think it’s important to have some background in Math: it seems easy to just call a module in your favorite machine learning library, but you should be able to understand the intuition, assumptions, and how it is working, in order to apply the correct algorithm and get good results. Another important thing is to practice your coding skills: when you analyze data, you write code all the time, and it’s essential to have efficient and organized code. The best thing to do is to practice: work and make predictions on real data.
3. Please tell us about a most impressive thing you have built with data
When I was working on horse racing betting, I developed a method to make predictions on quartet bets (4 first horses in correct order). The difficulty is that you only have the historical data on the winning combination, but you need all combinations. So I found a way to estimate the missing data and make accurate predictions.
4. Your favorite French Food!
Don’t get me started on this topic! Generally speaking the breads, pastries and desserts you find at the bakery and cake shop. How can I not mention the cheeses, with all the winter dishes based on it: raclette, tartiflette, fondue Savoyarde…Also I really like the galettes (buckwheat pancakes) from Brittany, fondue Bourguignonne, steak tartare…
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