People / Alumni / Class of 2023
Yi Chen graduated from the City University of Hong Kong with a major in Finance and two minors in Computing and Mathematics in 2022. As a business student, Yi Chen first encountered data science in the major course Financial Econometrics, where she first learned about modeling construction and prediction in the financial industry. The practical experience of using data analysis tools in the business world ignited her interest in diving into data science. With this passion, Yi Chen took several courses in Computer Science and Mathematics departments to gain solid quantitative knowledge. These efforts have prepared Yi Chen to feel more comfortable working as a CityU research assistant. Faced with the astonishing news related to GameStop, She researched how discussions on social media platforms such as Reddit influenced stock returns. Besides the academic experiences, Yi Chen also expanded her understanding of data science through several internships. Yi Chen worked as a strategic operations intern at Didi Global Inc. She extracted masses of historical data concerning drivers and passengers using SQL, constructed an RFM model to differentiate drivers' working patterns with Python, and optimized drivers' daily subsidy strategies based on the model to raise ROI. Faced with the loss of drivers without apparent reasons, Yi Chen also constructed a K-means model to cluster lost drivers' working patterns and designed relative recall strategies. More recently, Yi Chen worked as a data science intern at Unilever, where she experienced the whole process of data science. For modeling's convenience, Yi Chen conducted data mapping on different descriptions of the same products' names. She also made a matrix plot to visualize the sales pattern for various products and then filtered products appropriate for sales prediction. After processing complex data, Yi Chen completed feature engineering with Featuretools and then tuned a prophet model to complete sales forecasts. Finally, after all of her work, Yi Chen templated the codes so that other colleagues could reuse this pipeline conveniently in the future. All the practical data science experiences enabled Yi Chen to realize how complex real-world problems could be and how insufficient her relevant skills were. Therefore, Yi Chen joined the MSiA to gain more knowledge in the field of data science to become a qualified data scientist. She is looking forward to obtaining more hands-on experiences in this program, learning how to connect what she learned in class with real-world problems, and achieving her career goal as a data scientist.
