Portfolio

Tirth Patel

Data Scientist & ML Engineer
MSBA @ UCLA Anderson

About Me

I grew up fascinated by how systems work, which led me to pursue a B.Tech in Engineering at IIT Madras, one of India's premier technical institutions. There, I built a deep foundation in mathematics, statistics, and algorithms, and developed a taste for turning complex, messy data into decisions that actually matter.

During my undergrad, I joined Seat of Joy, a child safety startup incubated at IIT Madras, as a Business & Strategy Analyst. I built a probabilistic market-sizing model from Indian Census data (100+ tables, 200K+ rows each) that estimated 55M target customers with 5% YoY growth, developed a supply-chain optimization model using operations research principles, led full competitor and pricing analysis across the category, and represented the startup at Shark Tank India Auditions, pitching data-backed market and business strategy to investors.

I'm now pursuing my Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) at UCLA Anderson, deepening my expertise in machine learning, data engineering, and optimization. I'm drawn to problems where rigorous analysis drives real-world impact, from production agentic RAG systems to large-scale data pipelines to deep reinforcement learning.

Experience

Data Science Intern

Becton Dickinson

Aug 2026 – Current

Business & Strategy Analyst

Seat of Joy (Incubated at IIT Madras)

Child safety startup developing a full-body protective seat for two-wheelers, addressing the 2 children lost daily in India to two-wheeler accidents.

2023 – 2024

India · During Undergrad

  • Shark Tank India Auditions: Stakeholder Advisory & Investor PresentationActed as the founding team's internal consultant, synthesising the market-sizing model, supply-chain analysis, competitive intelligence, and pricing strategy into a single client-ready narrative: total addressable market, competitive landscape, unit economics, and launch plan. Led a team of 3 through that synthesis, managed the founders' alignment on the story pre-audition, then presented live to a panel of investor stakeholders and fielded adversarial, numbers-first Q&A with every claim traced back to an underlying model, a full consulting-style cycle of analysis, client alignment, and defended delivery.
  • Probabilistic Market-Sizing Model (Census Data)Sifted through 100+ Indian Census 2011 tables (200K+ rows each) to extract birth-order frequency matrices and inter-birth age-gap distributions. Built a joint-probability model that combined conditional age-gap probabilities with birth-order likelihoods to estimate, for any target year, how many Indian families have a child aged 3–6. Layered linear regression on historical cohorts to project YoY growth. Delivered an estimate of 55M addressable customers with 5% annual growth (45% more accurate than the startup's prior figures) and became the anchoring market-size number in every investor deck.
  • Supply-Chain Optimization Model (Operations Research)Formulated a profit-maximising distribution model in Gurobi / Excel Solver. The objective maximised margin across state-level shipping routes, accounting for manufacturing costs, per-unit shipping rates, and selling price. Added an elastic-net-style penalty to discourage over-concentration in any single state, and used the market-sizing model's state-level demand estimates as allocation caps. The model produces ready-to-execute distribution recommendations that can scale directly into production operations.
  • Competitive Intelligence & Pricing StrategyConducted a full-stack competitive analysis across three child-safety product categories: built detailed SWOT profiles, cold-called manufacturers to source actual production costs, and computed competitor margins from first principles. Used margin benchmarking to derive a defensible pricing band, quantify competitive moat, and inform go-to-market sequencing. All findings fed directly into investor pitch materials and the product launch strategy.

Projects

A selection of data science and ML engineering work.

Theme Park Wait-Time Forecasting: Production MLOps Pipeline

A production ML pipeline that forecasts theme park wait times a week ahead, retrained unattended every week on Databricks and served live for $0/month. Powers the Mapblazer routing engine.

PythonDatabricksPySparkDelta LakeProphetXGBoostSupabasePostgreSQLGitHub ActionsAWS EC2pandasSQL

MotivationA route built on 9 AM wait times is already wrong by 1 PM, because crowds shift all day and one bad estimate cascades into a ruined plan. I built the forecasting system that predicts wait times across the whole week, so Mapblazer's routing engine can anticipate crowd flow instead of chasing it.

Achievements
  • Ships fully unattended across 109 attractions in 5 parks, forecasting 7 days out for $0/month in infrastructure.
  • Cut holdout MAE 26.3% below baseline (7.01 vs 9.51 min) and lifted 10-minute accuracy from 64.5% to 76.6%.
  • A champion/challenger promotion gate and 12 automated quality checks keep the live dashboard from ever going stale.

Theme Park Route Optimization: Time-Dependent MILP Solver

An exact Gurobi MILP that plans a whole park day at once: which rides to do, in what order, and at what time, with every queue priced by the 30-minute slot you actually arrive in. The routing engine behind Mapblazer.

PythonGurobiMixed-Integer ProgrammingOperations ResearchCombinatorial OptimizationFastAPIPydanticpytest

MotivationA park day is not a shortest-path problem: a ride costs whatever its queue costs, the queue changes hour by hour, and the order you pick changes the costs that decide the order. I wanted to solve that feedback loop exactly rather than greedily, with an objective that says when idling for a cheaper slot is worth the wait it costs.

Achievements
  • Saves an average of 22 minutes of queue time per itinerary against the legacy LLM planner it replaced, up to a full hour on a 12-hour park day.
  • Cut itinerary generation from a 60-second LLM average to a 10-second exact solve: 83.3% faster, with per-query token costs eliminated entirely.
  • Solves the day exactly as a time-dependent orienteering problem, each ride priced by the 30-minute slot the plan actually arrives in.

Airline Crew Pairing: Transformer Deep-RL Scheduler

A ViT-style Deep Q-Network that builds a month of legal airline crew pairings one leg at a time, feasible by construction, published as an interactive replay you can scrub decision by decision.

PyTorchTransformersDeep RLDouble DQNCUDANumPyFastAPIpytestTensorBoardPythonOperations Research

MotivationCrew cost is second only to fuel for most airlines, and the classical column-generation approach has to be rebuilt for every schedule. I wanted to know whether a learned construction policy could obey a real rulebook exactly, generalize to a month it had never seen, and trade a little coverage for solutions that don't shatter when one flight runs late.

Achievements
  • Every scheduling rule lives in the action mask, so the agent can never emit an illegal pairing, verified over random rollouts.
  • Trained on 40 perturbed schedules, reaching 0.658 held-out coverage on 8 unseen instances the policy never trained on.
  • Reused the trained value network as a search heuristic at inference, no retraining, for a further 4-point coverage lift.

Airbnb Superhost Badge: Causal Impact Study (Regression Discontinuity)

A regression discontinuity re-test of whether Airbnb's Superhost badge still moves host outcomes now that Guest Favorite has taken over discovery. Five of six outcomes show no jump at the 4.8 cutoff; only review volume does.

PythonCausal InferenceRegression DiscontinuitystatsmodelsEconometricspandasNumPyVADER NLPseabornMatplotlib

MotivationPublished research from 2023 found the Superhost badge causally lifted bookings and revenue at the 4.8-rating cutoff. Then Airbnb launched Guest Favorite and removed the Superhost search filter, so the discovery mechanism behind that finding was gone. I wanted to run the same design on current data and report the answer it gave, not the one that would make a nicer story.

Achievements
  • Re-tested a 2023 published finding on a changed platform: five of six outcomes show no significant effect at the same cutoff.
  • Built a 125,685-host panel from 34 U.S. metros and isolated the badge with a ±0.05 bandwidth around the 4.8 cutoff.
  • Estimated six outcomes at once, so neither the nulls nor the one significant result rests on a hand-picked dependent variable.

Course Material Q&A Assistant: Agentic RAG System

Production-deployed agentic RAG system for UCLA MSBA students to query course materials (lecture slides, transcripts, and PDFs) using natural language. Live at tirth-courserag.duckdns.org.

LangGraphFastAPIChromaDBClaude HaikuOpenAIGoogle Drive APIDockerPythonSQLiteWebSocket

MotivationThe UCLA MSBA program runs 4 simultaneous courses, each with its own slides, transcripts, homework deadlines, and deliverables spread across a shared Google Drive. Students constantly lose time hunting for information manually. I built a fully agentic system that classifies every query, self-verifies deadline answers, supports human-approved file uploads, and can explain exactly which source chunks drove any answer, deployed at effectively zero infrastructure cost on Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

Achievements
  • Built a 13-node LangGraph agent with conditional routing across 5 query types: deadline, summary, upload, general Q&A, and source explanation
  • Implemented self-verifying deadline extraction: LLM extracts date → re-queries ChromaDB with rephrased search → cross-references results → surfaces conflicts with confidence indicator
  • Designed human-in-the-loop upload approval using LangGraph interrupt-before + SQLite checkpointer: LLM proposes a Drive folder path, user approves/edits before embedding, preventing vector store pollution

Weather-Driven Restaurant Sentiment: Big Data ETL & NLP Pipeline

End-to-end data engineering pipeline correlating weather patterns with Yelp restaurant sentiment using PySpark, Snowflake, Airflow, and Tableau, processing 2M+ records.

PySparkSnowflakeAirflowTableauVADER NLPPython

MotivationCurious whether weather drives restaurant ratings and business patterns, I built a production-grade data pipeline ingesting the full Yelp Academic Dataset and OpenWeatherMap API, performing distributed ETL at scale, NLP sentiment scoring, and surfacing insights through an executive Tableau dashboard.

Achievements
  • Discovered the "Cold Weather Sentiment Paradox": Freezing weather drops volume to 101/day but yields the highest average sentiment index (0.71)
  • Identified Extreme Heat as the major deterrent to dining out, dropping review volume to ~30/day with the lowest sentiment (0.65)
  • Found that Rainy/Snowy weather causes a 50.7% drop in volume (143/day vs 290/day) but retains a resilient sentiment index identical to pleasant days (0.69)

Maltese Gear Cube Solver: Deep Reinforcement Learning & Search

Deep reinforcement learning agent that solves the Maltese Gear Cube using a CUDA-accelerated neural heuristic.

PyTorchTensorFlowCUDADeep LearningDeep RLPythonNumPy

MotivationTo apply the DeepCubeA algorithm to a novel, higher-complexity puzzle and validate whether deep RL can generalize to unseen combinatorial state spaces.

Achievements
  • Trained a value network on 50M+ self-generated cube states using PyTorch + CUDA
  • Implemented batched A* search guided by learned heuristic, solving cubes optimally
  • Achieved 100% solve rate on test set within optimal or near-optimal move counts

Skills

The tools and technologies I work with.

Machine Learning

XGBoostProphetscikit-learnPyTorchTensorFlowDeep LearningDeep RLCUDATime-Series ForecastingFeature EngineeringTransformersDeep Q-NetworksReward Design

MLOps & Productionization

DatabricksDatabricks Asset BundlesAutomated RetrainingChampion/Challenger PromotionData Quality GatesGitHub ActionsCI/CDDockerAWS EC2TensorBoardExperiment Tracking

Optimization & Operations Research

GurobiLinear ProgrammingMixed-Integer ProgrammingCombinatorial OptimizationConstraint ModelingLazy Constraint GenerationRouting & SchedulingOperations Research

Statistics & Causal Inference

Probability & StatisticsRegressionCausal InferenceRegression DiscontinuityEconometricsMathematical ModelingMarket Sizing Models

Languages & Tools

PythonSQLRJavaScriptTypeScriptGitJupyterpytestNext.jsExcelsystemdOracle CloudYAML-Driven Configuration

LLMs & Generative AI

LangGraphAgentic RAGChromaDBVector SearchClaude & OpenAI APIsEmbeddingsHugging FacePrompt Engineering

Analytics & Visualization

TableaupandasNumPyMatplotlibVADER NLPSentiment AnalysisKPI DesignExecutive Dashboardsstatsmodelsseaborn

Data Engineering

PySparkDelta LakeSnowflakeAirflowMedallion ArchitecturePostgreSQLSupabaseFastAPIPydanticETL / ELT

Get In Touch

Whether you're recruiting, collaborating, or just want to talk data, my inbox is always open.