We kick off the new year with two data scientists from Via discussing how to optimize driver incentives.

Thank you toeBay NYCfor hosting us.

About the Talk:

The ridesharing industry depends heavily on dynamic incentives on both the rider & driver side. Well present Vias methodology for addressing the driver incentive side. Offering drivers personalized promotions to get them to work exactly when we need them requires a combination of a couple ofdifferent components, each of which is complex on its own:

Predicting how each driver responds to each promotion

Selecting the appropriate promo for each driver to hit attendance targets at the lowest cost

Well go over why predicting how drivers respond to monetary incentives is a complex problem, & the active academic research on the topic. Well then explain the different models we built & how we selected an appropriate model, & how we tied the models to an optimization module to make promo recommendations on an ongoing basis.

About the Speakers:

Aleks Sinayev is a data scientist at Via Transportation working on building datasets & models used to describe & predict driver behavior as well as designing & analyzing experiments. He holds a PhD in Quantitative Psychology which informs his work at Via.

Saar Golde is the Chief Data Scientist at Via, a long-time member of the R meetup group & previous speaker at both the meetup & R Conference. He holds a Ph.D in Economics from Stanford & a Masters in Decisions & Operations Research, both of which come in handy at least twice a week.

Pizza

begins at 6:30, the talk starts at 7, then after we head to the local bar.