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DATA / AI / SYSTEMS

Achraf Ez

Data & AI Consultant · Agentic Entrepreneur · Founder

I like solving problems. The bigger the problem, the stronger my determination.

Paris, France

Who am I?

I build data and AI systems from a foundation in production machine learning, time series, and engineering.

Selected work

Open source

Correctness fixes to libraries I use, each one reproduced before it was reported.

Merged upstream (9)

  • skrub-data/skrubdatetime feature engineering
  • pydantic/genai-pricesprice-lookup cache correctness
  • skrub-data/skrubrobust categorical encoding workflows
  • Neuralk-AI/NeuralkFoundry-CEreliable model-selection workflows
  • PyWavelets/pywtedge-case padding behavior
  • aeon-toolkit/aeonFourier smoothing for real-valued signals
  • aeon-toolkit/aeonunequal-length time-series workflows
  • statsmodels/statsmodelstime-series diagnostics around missing data
  • shap/shapwording in model-explanation outputs

Open (8)

  • grll/mcpadapt
  • jitsi/jiwer
  • mjpost/sacrebleuBug confirmed by a maintainer
  • thedatumorg/TSB-AD
  • thedatumorg/TSB-AD
  • awslabs/gluonts
  • sktime/sktime
  • deepcharles/ruptures

Closed (1)

  • PriorLabs/tabpfn-time-seriesClosed with the issue, not on correctness

Writing

2026

2025

  • Forecast Metrics

    25 min read

    My notes on forecast metrics for weekly sales forecasts: MAE, bias, MAPE, WAPE, MASE and RMSSE, business KPIs from a split bias, censored demand in backtests, and why RelMAE and RelMSE replaced MASE and RMSSE.

  • Solving the Low and High Seller Bias in a Weekly Sales Forecast

    16 min read

    Two studies on a LightGBM weekly sales forecast that under-forecasts high sellers and over-forecasts low sellers: separate models, a better initialisation, and normalizing the dataset, then a wide backtest of normalization.

  • Validation, Hyperparameter and Feature Set Studies for a Weekly Sales Forecast

    41 min read

    Three studies on a LightGBM weekly sales forecast, in the order we ran them: the validation set for early stopping, the hyperparameter set, and the feature set.

  • Explainability Using SHAP

    15 min read

    How I used SHAP to explain a LightGBM sales forecast: the plots, an example of an analysis, feature correlation with SHAP, a template notebook and an explainability dashboard.

  • How Far Should You Tune LightGBM? A Budget for the Last Fraction of a Point

    32 min read

    Tuning LightGBM can win. Only a comparison with a fair early-stopped baseline, on data the search never touched, shows whether the last fraction of a point pays for the search.

  • How LightGBM Builds Its Trees

    16 min read

    Decision trees, bagging and random forests, gradient boosting, then LightGBM: leaf-wise growth, histograms, GOSS, feature bundling, its parameters and its categorical splits.

Others