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The power of 1 feature: how Airbnb’s 2013 location model transformed search rankings
Why high-quality feature engineering beats the kitchen-sink approach every time.
This week I have been reflecting on all the value I have gotten from scientific papers when applied to work. I don’t think I will ever write a scientific paper, but, I do believe I can share with the Data Science community what I understood from these papers in a more distilled way.
This is why I wanted to share with you my first paper review (actually it was a blog post in ) which talks about location relevance at Airbnb. If you want to learn how 1 feature made Airbnb’s search smarter, tag along with me!
Let’s begin!
PS: Images mostly come from Airbnb’s paper with my annotations. Otherwise, I will specify the source of the image clearly.
Where can you find the paper?
This is an old blog post, dating back to 2013, and in later years Airbnb have adopted other techniques to measure location relevance. This deep dive into Airbnb’s 2013 location model highlights how feature engineering outperformed brute-force approaches. I can’t stress enough the…
