Productizing Data Science at Twitch – Twitch Blog

A key function of data science at Twitch is using behavioral data to build data products that improve our products and services. Some examples of products that data science has helped to launch include the AutoMod chat moderation system, the similar channel recommendations used for Auto Hosting, and the recommendation system for VODs. This post discusses some of the tradeoffs involved when building data products and presents our approach for scaling predictive models to millions of users. The decision to build a data product at Twitch is often the result of exploratory analysis performed by a data scientist. For example, an investigation of our user communities may result in findings about which types of channels different groups of users are likely to follow. We can use these insights to build predictive models, such as a recommendation system that identifies similar channels on our platform.