A Gentle Introduction to Random Forests, Ensembles, and Performance Metrics in a Commercial System

This is the first in a series of posts that illustrate what our data team is up to, experimenting with, and building'under the hood' at CitizenNet. He has been involved in web-scale machine learning and information retrieval for over 10 years. One of the first posts we published spoke at a high level of the technical problem CitizenNet is trying to solve. In essence, we are trying to predict what combinations of demographic and interest targets will be interested in some piece of content. On the CitizenNet platform, a user would create a project that would define (broadly) the target audience, the pieces of Facebook content they are looking to promote, and other campaign and financial information. Behind the scenes, a robust prediction system builds the targets for the project.