The humans of Numerai

[liz]

hi, i’m liz.

i’m 33. i’ve been programming since i was 6.

working with ai, consciousness, and predicting the future programatically have been dreams of mine since middle school.

i have my b.a. in music composition, though before i changed schools i was a math major for several years at carnegie mellon.

i worked as an analyst in the field of actuarial consulting for 5 years. i recently quit my job due to covid-related stress and beyond. the corporate environment isn’t really for me. while i worked there i was published, and did some major activism for nonbinary people, which i’m proud of.

i’ve been hustling for my whole life. competing on numerai is my way to check that box and keep my analytical skills sharp while i develop psychological skills (i’m applying to graduate programs in counseling, and starting a meditation center).

i intend to make my edge on numer.ai and predictive modeling in general by exploring the transformation step in novel ways.

in my free time i like to garden, spend time with my partners and my cat, polynomial. i’m a key member of a local queer art collective that is developing streaming 3D-modeled live-tracked adult content.

hiya

[wigglemuse]

Bump. Let’s resurrect this thread. Noobs introduce yourself (if you want).

[robbo_the_fossil]

Ok I’ll go for it.

Hi everyone! I’m new and probably like a lot of new people I found Numerai via Lex Fridman’s podcast with Richard Craib. The name is Scott but feel free to call me Robbo (The_Fossil is just because I’m probably older than most people here).

I’m trained in biophysics and molecular biology but I’ve always had a very mathematical interest and approach to my work. And to be honest in the past few years I grew less and less interested in the biological problems I was working on. I still do this as my job but my career tanked, job prospects tanked and I decided to follow what is probably my true passion which is maths/statistics and really understanding numerical data. I’ve played with Kaggle but found it uninspiring. I dabble in web stuff for fun and maybe profit soon. And now Numerai has grabbed my attention.

I don’t expect to make much money here. I’m lucky to have a living situation where my financials are doing ok and I’m not impressed by money. I almost failed high school economics, but the stock market is a problem that just keeps bringing me back. I hope to learn a lot, get better at my craft, and pass on what I know as well.

Cheers,

Robbo (The Fossil)

[aslaboda2000]

Hello everyone! I’m 20 years old and currently studying biomedical engineering for my undergrad. No experience in python before stumbling across numerai on Lex’s podcast, so I’m a total noob with machine learning. Currently I’m just fiddling around with numerai on weekends and hoping to learn some useful skills in coding and maybe even make some NMR from staking. Still not 100% sure what I want to do after college so I’m trying new things and numerai is one of them.

[krm]

Sup yo

I’m Kyle. Senior Software Engineer at Salsify. I do full stack Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and sometimes C++/LUA. I’m a polyglot when it comes to programming, I’ve written something in just about every language worth mentioning in 2021.

One of my previous jobs was at a computer vision company which is where I got introduced to datascience/ML. I did a lot of operations work (setting up large ETL pipeline and training clusters), as well as a pretty cool real time display using twitter’s firehose.

I had known about numer.ai for a little bit before trying it out myself. Rich and Lex’s podcast was what finally drove me to compete myself.

No formal data science education or anything like that, just a senior software engineer here learning. I’ve been reading d2l.ai and watching StatQuest videos to catch up haha. Thankfully reading documentation is a skill I’ve cultivated.

My github : github.com/kmontag42
Nothing too spectacular on there as these days all my work is in private company repos. Feel free to ask me about anything on there

Only been participating for about a month now, but have really enjoyed it so far. Looking forward to trying out some more complex methodologies now that I’ve gotten my feet properly wet.

[gammarat]

I guess I’m the only antique around these parts . I got introduced to programming in 1969 via a paper tape terminal in high school using FORTRAN. But as I wasn’t all that fond of education I took off for a decade or so. Then around 1980 I started university and took just about all math and physics, with one semester in Pascal to fulfill an arts requirement. I took math because, with no labs, no term papers, and a predictable amount of homework, it was the ideal subject for a single parent.

After getting my MSc I spend the next 25 years mostly wandering around the applied math fields in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and retired in 2009. Those areas provided me a great intro to modern computing, particularly with respect to approaches now lumped together under Bayesian Analysis. So I’ve worked at developing algorithms for solving real world problems from electroquasistatics to Forex to torpedo analysis and ocean acoustics.

Otoh, I’ve spent most of the last decade drawing and painting, leaving the left side of my brain feeling a little under-appreciated. So when I stumbled across this site I thought, well here’s something new, let’s give it a shot!. So I dug out my MatLab, and here I am.

Cheers,
Chris

[mrquantsalot]

Hello everybody,

I’m MrQuantsALot an economics undergraduate in the US. I found this protocol couple of days ago from an ad on Coinbase and am kind of obsessing over it. I am still very new at ML so I am mostly looking to try to get my hands dirty building an algo that is actually valuable.

Right now, I am just doing some exploratory data analysis on the public user data from this API. I am trying to figure out things like correlation between stake size and other variables like model corr and ROI. Once I get the finish up I’ll post the results and the source code in the forum here. This markets itself as the hardest data science tournament on the planet and I want to put some numbers on that.

[jeremy_berros]

Hi guys,

My name is Jeremy Berros, I am one of the frenchies from the Numerai community and I have been participating since Sept 2020.

I am currently a Business Developer in the Wine Industry in North America (imagine that a french guy working in the Wine Business ). I have been working in various industries from Oil&Gas projects in Africa, Energy in Europe to the AG Industry & Wine in the US / Canada.

My interest in Finance goes back to my time at University of Florida in 2008/2009 when I did my thesis in Options Pricing at the Risk Management Lab and developing my models on Matlab.

I am a self-learner in Machine Learning, started applying Computer Vision to AG projects and now going back to my first love in Finance with this great problem-solving competition that is Numerai

Don’t hesitate to hit me up on Rocket Chat or DM me!

Take care guys and talk to you soon!

[datacryptoanalytics]

Hi everyone! My name is Felipe Soares i live in brazil, biotechnology student focused on bioinformatics, 5 years programmer and 6 years forex trading.

created DataCrypto Analytics, an open source project for analyzing cryptocurrencies with machine learning algorithms.

[zodiak]

Hi everybody!

I’ve been participating occasionally since 2018 and more or less consistently since late 2019, but been mostly lurking in chat, so I feel like I should introduce myself.
My Name is Alex and by day I’m a radiologist in Germany. I do a bit of research on machine learning with radiologic images but most of my time is spent in patient care. I was always fascinated by the human mind and it’s abilities and I love technology so discovering machine learning was mind-blowing to me. It has been my hobby for a few years now and Numerai is a great source of motivation and knowledge.
The community here is amazing and seeing the development of the community and the Numerai team over the years makes me really believe that this project is something special that I’m happy to be a small part of.
I’m not a talkative guy but I’ll try to get more involved in the future. Feel free to hit me up anytime.

Cheers

[magic101]

Hi everyone. I found out about Numerai via reddit just two weeks ago, thought it looked very interesting and decided to have a try. I have since spent most evenings trying new ideas and running them overnight, to find that my Spearman corr has risen by 0.0000001…

My background is in database architecture and development as a consultant across various industries, with bits of ML here and there over recent years. As we’re still in lockdown here in the UK, this is a pleasant pastime for me and I’ll be trying to work my way up that leaderboard!

[mesozoicmetallurgist]

Hello, I have been lurking around here for sometime, but in the interest of being more active in the community, here goes a proper introduction.

My name is Alex Klugiewicz, and I am on my third year in college working on a degree at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, majoring in computer science, and minoring in both data science and physics. I found Numerai in May of 2019, after moving on from Quantopian in search of a project where I could learn and practice machine learning. Given the difficulty of the tournament, it quickly grew into an active hobby outside of school, and, while I have been programming for several years now, my experience building and testing ideas here in the tournament has exponentially accelerated my abilities as a data scientist.

Outside of school and the tournament, I like to play video games, primarily strategy and simulation (Kerbal Space Program and Civilization V are among my favorites), but I also dabble in many other genres and can enjoy playing just about anything if I get to play it with friends. I recently obtained a VR headset, and have spent many hours enjoying and experiencing what I wholly believe will become an incredibly influential medium of extended reality in the near future. I tend to listen to a lot of music (according to spotify, roughly 20% of my waking life in 2020), catch my additions to the Numerai or Die spotify playlist from https://twitter.com/wzhang12/status/1372462149944143874.

I hope to be contributing with some forum posts in the near future. But in the meantime, if you want a moderately rambley breakdown of my models, I have a google doc for that: MesozoicMetallurgist Numerai Model List - Google Docs

[th3blacksmith]

G’day all,
I have only been participating for a couple of months now, so I don’t know how much wisdom I can bring I’m afraid.
I have a silver and a couple of bronze medals which I am very proud of, although I am aware that there could be some luck involved there…

So, who am I?
I have been (and still am) a heavy fabricator and blacksmith for the last 15 years as the username might suggest. I know that I am very out of place here, as I read through these posts and realise that I am possibly the only person without some awesome sounding tech job or PHD.

I have been successfully trading my own portfolio for the last 15 years along side my day job, started in small cap ASX stocks, then into US stocks and options, then currencies, futures, fixed income etc.
This in turn led me to learning python so as to try and automate some strategies I as having some success with.
I then decided to do an undergraduate degree in finance and economics, which I am finishing up this year.
On top of this, I have started to do some freelance programming work on the side which is keeping my python skills sharp. Nothing sexy, just some web scraping scripts and basic automation at this stage but I am hoping to start a career in this space somewhere eventually. This is also about when I decided to have a good crack at this tournament and see where I fit in.

I’m not well versed in communicating over the internet but I would love to have a chat if anyone would like to say g’day.

Thanks for the wonderful community and opportunity.
Cheers!

[sirbradflies]

Hi everybody,

I have found out about Numerai in 2017 when I was looking for an engaging way to learn AI and dust off my coding skills.

I am Italian, graduated on Computer Engineering but then I went on the management path, working as a consultant, taking my MBA at MIT and now managing a cybersecurity company in Indonesia.

Numerai was a great way for me to learn and apply the fundamentals of machine learning which ultimately led to executing several AI projects for companies and now I have started my AI-solution company

Thanks for the great ride and looking forward to connect with the rest of the community!
Sirbradflies

[mindyoself]

Hello Everyone,

I guess I also need to step up, althrough in my defence I didn’t think newbies mattered on this thread, but I guess it’s been sometime now so I will class myself as a 3year sophomore

I guess I’ll be the odd one out, I am Joe, MD and clinical researcher with a budding interest in AI and blockchain for everything health and health economy-related (which has extended my interest into Fund management and finance), currently based in the UK. Strangely enough the gap between the time I woke till the time I started really getting into numerai was scary long and shameful, but I am here now committed and submitting weekly with a very rubbish Corei5 laptop that I will be changing soon(I promise).

I understand a bit of what’s going on at least enough to dabble in the competition and tweak some hyperparameters to get some interesting results, and have absorbed a tonne from the community, so thank you all for being so generous with your knowledge and time. Whenever the next ErasureCon is happening after this God-forsaken Pandemic I’m there and will look forward to meeting and buying some of you drinks on my meager research salary (but it will be money well spent).

I started looking into Numerai way back in 2018 on my quest to understanding Blockchain, but did not have the python knowledge or skillset, let alone the AI knowlege to fully fathom Numerai’s awesomeness until COVID-19 recaliberated some of my priorities greatly.

So aside from doing my bit for healthcare, it’s a dream of mine to manage a hedgefund one day targetted at Healthcare Research for Brain Disorders. So when I finished my Masters at Oxford I have been learning as much as I can about Machine Learning. I am currently studying for and in my first year of a PhD in AI applied to neuroscience.

So I have been dedicating a proportion of my free time to really appreciating numerai in all it’s splendour and glorious awesomeness, learning and trying to give back when I can in between my clinical work. The community have been amazing and generous with their time and knowledge, which has really contributed to most of my very minimal understanding of Datascience for Finance, but certainly for Machine Learning in general.

Thanks for an awesome ride. Look forward to meeting some of you someday soon!

JD

[uncleganny]

Hello there.

I’m 34 years old and I’ve worked in software engineering, machine learning and data science for the past decade. I’ve split my time primarily between building models as a data scientist/ml engineer and building ML infrastructure to scale model development productivity. I currently work in the SF Bay Area at one of the FAANGs in engineering leadership/management in the ML space.

I picked up numerai during a recent paternity leave, after poking around the tournament briefly in 2017. It’s nice to have a ML problem to consistently noodle on, separate from work. I’ve never really worked directly on a more correlation based ranking problem, though I do have some light experience with recommender systems so it’s nice to be able to stretch in a new domain a little bit. The feedback loop in terms of performance updates has been fun to follow along with and is one aspect I’ve really enjoyed.

I’ve found it a good opportunity to be leverage ML best practices, and see how efficient I can make my setup at experimentation. Additionally there’s been some interesting research on new tabular learning algorithms that I’ve been excited to apply and this seemed like a good use case.

So far I have 8 models, but only a couple that I’ve staked on, most are used to observe online/offline differences that are trickier to measure. Like most folks here I use a mixture of boosting/deep learning approaches. I’ve recently leaned more into the full DL approach with some tentative promising results.

Looking forward to having other people to chat with about numerai as my wife gets tired of me blabbering about what experiments I’m running. Excited to discuss more ideas/topics in rocketchat and on the forum, I’ve been mostly a lurker. Also happy to chat about any other ML, software development or career topics.

The two most active models for me going forward are indoril Numerai and dunmer Numerai. The names are taken from the best video game ever, Morrowind.

Outside of numerai/work I spend most of my time parenting, playing smash brothers, basketball (obviously on pause for the last year+) and scouring r/mechmarket for artisan keycaps and aftermarket housings for topre boards.

[skyn3t]

I am somewhat of an OG. I first joined in 2016 and started staking in 2018/2019. I am incredibly grateful to Numerai and its employees, founders, investors, and advisors. I have learned a great deal from Richard Craib, Marco Lopez De Prado and Michael Oliver.

I have been a long-time believer in Numerai. I bought a decent amount of NMR around $2-5 at a time when there was not that much NMR being staked and there was a lot of negativity surrounding the tournament and crypto in general. My models have been up and down the leaderboard all the way into the top 20 positions. I got started with data science on Kaggle. I suggest people try out Kaggle simply because there is a lot of good information that can be applied to Numerai. Most of my pipeline is inspired from what I learned from the community there.

Recently, I have been playing around with Signals and it has been a lot of fun. I have many ideas but not enough time to implement them because of my day job. If I had it my way, I would just work on Numerai stuff.

At little about myself… I work for a big tech company. I am obsessed with AI and its implications for humanity. I recommend everyone read the book Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark. Also, I have been a longtime believer in TSLA (my stake is up over 1000%). I invest in companies that are innovators in AI. Besides investing and tech stuff I like powerlifting, photography and hiking.

Here is some random advice I have for participants… Run Monte Carlo simulations on payouts to get an idea of how volatility and compounding affects your returns. Focus on the long term, the short term is noisy. Read all of Michael Oliver’s posts and everything in rocket chat. Read everything by Marco Lopez De Prado. For Signals, read everything by SurajP, JRAI and JRB. Do not train on validation or select models based off validation scores. Focus on feature neutrality and experiment with it on your different models. Build a pipeline to train, cross validate, save/load models, ensemble and hyper parameter tune. Ideally, your pipeline should be dataset independent so that it can be used for different projects. If you do not have money or compute resources use Google Colab for free.

Books I recommend: Advances in Financial Machine Learning, Life 3.0, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, The Black Swan, Hedge Fund Market Wizards, The Man Who Solved the Market, A Man for All Markets, Dune.

[aventurine]

Seems this post keeps on rolling so Ill put in my bio…

My name is Alex and my current full time position is a field service engineer for a medial lab diagnostic instrumentation company in the Los Angeles area which is also where I grew up. I am more specialized into the areas of the clinical chemistry/immunochemistry instrumentation which deal mostly with analysis utilizing either photometric assays by determining the absorbance of wavelengths of light or chemiluminescence assays which measure light produced by a chemical reaction using enzyme labeled antibodies and antigens. Before this position I was a licensed medical lab technician working in hospitals and doctors office labs running the laboratory testing in all areas of the lab including, chemistry, hematology, microbiology, bloodbanking etc.

Before my career in the medial lab field I was in the US Army out of high school at 17. I had always had an affinity for science and math but wanted to do something on the front lines. I ended up choosing to become a forward observer in the field artillery sector and was attached to an infantry company with the 10th Mountain Division. The mathematical side of combat especially within the Artillery interested me a lot. It always amazed me at the level of mathematical knowledge needed to get this job done. Everything from simple trigonometry, elevation differences and firing angles all the way to the rotation of the earth factors into rounds from a cannon getting to the proper locations. I was deployed overseas to Iraq during the surges in 2007-2009. I eventually was promoted to Sergent at 20 years old and conducted training to become a Joint Fires Observer which trained me to call in Naval surface fire support, attack aviation close combat attack, and AC-130 calls for fire in support of Navy/Air Force Joint Tactical Air Controllers.

I married towards the end of my contract period and left the military in 2010. All of that training of course did not translate to a “civilian” career so shortly after leaving active duty I joined the reserves to train as a medical lab tech, chosen because of my love for science and math. I also had my first child in 2011.

During this period after training I found finance and stock trading. I instantly fell in love with everything finance and markets. I learned as much as I could and utilized this as a way to make extra money besides my full time positions. I ended up loving it so much I finished off my degree in finance. I also had my second child in 2015. With possible inflationary pressures of fed actions last year I started to move into the crypto space as well(I did have my small run of crypto trading in the 2017 runs as well but stopped trading it during the crypto “winter”)

I found Numerai/NMR when it was listed on coinbase the middle of last year. I have been trying to find a way to move into finance without losing too much pay from my current position and having to start from the “bottom” again. I even had thoughts of starting my own hedge fund. I instantly knew that if could figure this thing out, I could keep on what im doing and down the road possibly have enough capital to break off to work full time in finance and start something on my own. Where else anywhere can you mix crypto/data science and a hedge fund in one place! I had some coding knowledge from finance classes in python but no data science background. I buckled down for several months reading every single doc/forum post, advances in machine learning, several good textbooks from O’Reilly such as data science from scratch by Grus and Hands-On Machine learning with Scikit-learn, keras and TensorFlow from Geron and submitted my first model Aventurine. Let that run for a bit, started a small 25 NMR stake in Nov and when I realized it was doing very well made a larger purchase in NMR and staked around 340 NMR in Dec. Since then I have created several other models, started another large stake in model Amethyst and have been testing a little in signals.

I am super ridiculously bullish on Numerai and the project and the future of finance in the data science realm. I still love the stock market just as much as the crypto side of things and I cant wait to see where things go in this project!

[qeintelligence]

Hi everyone, time put myself on this list before the new dataset is released and I definitely don’t have any spare time left

I am Jos (a.k.a ‘the guy from Rotterdam’), 44 and guess what I live in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. I got a masters degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Delft and have really nice memories about that period there and still like to visit Delft.

So my background is more in Embedded Systems, but after uni worked as an engineer for a long time at a company specialized in designing/building selfservice checkin machines at airports worldwide. After settling down though I changed careers several times and finally went into software consultancy (Microsoft, Azure) with the idea to learn a lot about cloud computing. I still work at the same company, but now with the focus on (big) data, AI, ML…

Anyway, when it comes to software engineering, cloud infra and such I have a lot of experience, also in terms of NLP, cognitive vision with ML etc. I did stuff before. The ‘traditional’ ML I wanted to learn more, so here we are

Hope to talk to you all soon!

[nyuton]

What a journey, mate! Congrats!