Matthew Ruffner Email & Phone Number

I am an explorer, inquisitive about the world around me. My journey has taken me up mountains, around the world and to the outer limits of our universe. This passion to understand earned me degrees in physics and astrophysics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and brought me to data science and predictive analytics. I subsequently received a masters degree from the University of Texas at Austin in Business Analytics where I learned the tools and skills to use data to optimize outcomes and better understand why and how systems work. While at UT, I concurrently interned for Vestergaard, a socially responsible company using data to optimize bednet usage to end the scourge of malaria and build out that data to address other health challenges in the global South. At Vestergaard I clean and preprocess datasets, perform various analyses and data manipulations in Python, then create findings reports with visualizations of my analyses. After graduating, I worked at Ankura, a litigation consulting firm, where I provided data analysis and engineering expertise for high-profile litigation cases. Currently, I work at Horizon Next, an analytics focused media agency where I run various models aimed at optimizing marketing decisions for our clients.My goal is to bring together my skills, experience and internal drive to improve businesses and enhance value.I know that life is short and have always been conscious to optimize my time and use it as efficiently as possible. I like to spend my free time working out, running, reading science fiction, exploring new music and planning my next adventure of backpacking, rock climbing or running marathons. I supplement my school learnings by staying up to date on the latest advances in machine learning using my subscription to towardsdatascience, following Facebook AI and DeepMind on social media, and picking the brains of my professors. I tinker with my own predictive models in sports analytics that I started in undergrad particularly my first sports passion of soccer and latest interest in basketball.Below is a summary of my technical experiences:Programming skills: Python (Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-Learn, Matplotlib, SHAP, Regular Expressions), R (ggplot2, dplyr), SQL, SAS, PowerBI, MongoDB, PyTorch/TensorFlow Data Manipulation: K-Means Clustering, PCA, (Lasso, Ridge, Elastic Net) Regularization, Data ImputationStatistical Modeling: Regression, KNN, Random Forest, XGBoost, Neural NetworksMiscellaneous: Time Series Analysis (ARIMA, ETS), Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision and, yes, Excel

Listed skills include Mathematics, Arima, Physics, Neural Networks, and 45 others.