Alex Chin

I’m a statistician, researcher, and engineer based in New York. Currently I develop policy optimization and event sequence modeling methodologies for marketing and product applications at Airbnb. I came to Airbnb by way of Motif Analytics, where I was a founding engineer and worked on transformer models for product analytics, a custom DSL and query engine for processing event data, and an LLM copilot tool for our query editor.

Previously I worked on experimentation at Lyft, building Lyft’s adaptive experimentation platform from scratch and working on various other forecasting, causal inference, and market signals problems for operating Lyft’s marketplace.

I have a broad range of technical interests, but the common thread among them is that I enjoy developing practical, scalable methodology; bringing statistical thinking to ML and AI problems; and building quick and scrappy prototypes.

My Ph.D. is in Statistics from Stanford in March 2019, working with Johan Ugander. My dissertation was on causal inference under interference.

Before Stanford I was a Park Scholar at NC State. I also spent a semester studying math in Budapest, Hungary.

Education

Ph.D. Statistics, M.S. Statistics, Stanford University, March 2019.

• Ingram Olkin Interdisciplinary Research Dissertation Award [announcement] [thesis]

B.S. Mathematics, B.S. Economics, Minor in Linguistics, NC State University, May 2014