About
I’m Theun van Vliet, a freelance data scientist in Amsterdam. I like problems where the answer actually changes a decision, not just a dashboard, and I care more about being right about the real question than precise about the wrong one.
Background
- MSc Econometrics & Management Science (Quantitative Marketing), Erasmus University Rotterdam
- BSc Econometrics & Operations Research, Erasmus University Rotterdam
- Former Data Science Manager at Accenture, where I ended up leading the Data Science & ML Engineering practice
What I do
Over the years I’ve worked on:
- Predictive models for things like customer acquisition, fiber-rollout permissions, aircraft turnarounds, and recurring bank transactions. Some of these shipped to production, some stayed a one-off analysis.
- Getting models to run in production, with monitoring, alerting, and dashboards. The turnaround model at Schiphol grew from an internal tool into something used across airports.
- NLP and deep learning, from pulling structured data out of contracts to finding patterns in call transcripts.
- Experiments, including an RCT for a telecom’s fiber rollout and a test to detect confirmation bias in an annotation tool.
- Plenty of analysis that never turns into a model but still answers the question, like which parts of a customer journey cost people the most effort, or whether battery data shows early signs of fire risk.
Under most of it is an econometrics and statistics background, and a habit of asking whether the number in front of me means what everyone assumes it means.
Tools
Elsewhere
I’m a co-founder of youai, a side project with friends that brings art to life with AI for museums and cultural spaces.
I also built Time Blokker, a day-planning app for iOS and Android.