--- title: "Human Stories in AI: Abbas Merchant@Matics Analytics" url: https://daily.dev/posts/human-stories-in-ai-abbas-merchant-matics-analytics-3tlwmu0ba source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIGOnM6Cf_E type: video:youtube source: "StatQuest with Josh Starmer" published: 2026-05-31T07:43:35.954Z updated: 2026-05-31T07:54:06.584Z tags: ["machine-learning", "data-science", "feature-engineering"] reading_time: 54 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Human Stories in AI: Abbas Merchant@Matics Analytics **[StatQuest with Josh Starmer](https://daily.dev/sources/statquest)** · 54 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Abbas Merchant, founder and CEO of Matics Analytics, shares his unconventional career journey from dropping out of high school to join his family business, returning to education, discovering statistics and ML through StatQuest, landing an AI/ML internship, and eventually founding a startup focused on bringing AI and analytics to SMEs. He details a real-world ML-powered marketing project for a US financial company, covering propensity modeling, expected spend regression, channel preference classification, feature engineering, SHAP values for explainability, and lift/gain charts for evaluating campaign targeting effectiveness. The conversation also covers the iterative nature of data science work, where 70% of effort goes into data preprocessing and feature engineering rather than modeling itself. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: --- Tags: [#machine-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/machine-learning), [#data-science](https://daily.dev/tags/data-science), [#feature-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/feature-engineering) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/human-stories-in-ai-abbas-merchant-matics-analytics-3tlwmu0ba)