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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/03/data-science-at-stitchfix.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
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<p>If you want to see a great example of how data science can inform every stage of a business process, from product concept to operations, look no further than <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/">Stitch Fix's Algorithms Tour</a>. Scroll down through this explainer to see how this personal styling service uses data and statistical inference to suggest clothes their customers will love, ship them from a nearby warehouse (already stocked thanks to demand modeling), and incorporate customer feedback and designer trends into the next round of suggestions.</p>
<p>The design of the Tour is interactive and elegant, and clearly someone put a lot of work into it. It's a great example of simplifying the detail of data science into a format where the impacts are immediately apparent. Communicating the benefits of data science to non-experts is a key skill of any data scientist, and <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://brohrer.github.io/oversimplify.html">dialing down on the complexity</a>, while not dumbing down the science, is key to that communication.</p>
<p><img src="http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/assets/posts/2017-03-01-hybrid/hybrid-designs.svg"></p>
<p>From the Tour, we can see that Stitch Fix's data science is far from simple. Their methods aren't just black-box machine learning techniques: rather, they are using statistical inference to figure out <em>why</em> customers like particular products (or <em>why</em> operational strategies are efficient or not) rather than simply predicting <em>what</em> will happen. This is all driven by a <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2017/01/23/scaling-ds-at-sf-slides-from-ddtexas/">sophisticated data science platform</a>, that enables the team to employ techniques like <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2015/07/30/gam/">Generalized Additive Models</a> implemented in R, or <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2015/03/11/word-is-worth-a-thousand-vectors/">Natural Language Processing</a> implemented in Python. Check out their <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/">MultiThreaded blog</a> for more details on data science applications at Stitch Fix, and be sure to check out the Algorithms Tour linked below.</p>
<p>Stitch Fix MultiThreaded: <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/">Algorithms Tour</a></p>
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