Sailaxman Kotha

Data Science Graduate

Hey, I’m happy you’re here

Thanks for stopping by!

I’m a graduate student in Data Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois. I now call Chicago home - a city whose messy, magnificent data (transit, weather, food) keeps me endlessly curious. My work sits at the intersection of statistical modeling, machine learning, and real-world decision making. I like to take data that’s sitting around doing nothing and mould it into something actually answers a question.

I’m currently seeking Data Science, Analyst and ML Engineering roles and will be available for full-time opportunities. I welcome conversations with teams that value investment in talent. I am authorized to work in the U.S. through 2029 and do not require sponsorship at this time.

Get in touch by sending me a note!

About me

Student turned data scientist — still a student, honestly — curious about every place where data meets decisions that affect real people.

Research Interests

My research interests gravitate toward causal inference for policy evaluation, and time series econometrics, particularly in contexts where the stakes are public: healthcare access, economic shocks, and government accountability. I’m drawn to problems where the data is messy, the population is underserved, and the modeling choices genuinely matter.

What I’m Working On

Medicaid & HHS (D.O.G.E) Built an analysis examining how efficiently federal dollars flow through Medicaid and HHS programs, exploring where spend-per-outcome ratios diverge across states and where administrative overhead may be quietly swallowing funds meant for patients.

Rideshare Market Analysis Explored ride-share usage patterns, pricing dynamics, and demand forecasting - digging into how surge pricing, time-of-day, and geography interact in ways riders feel but rarely see quantified.

Instacart Purchase Behavior Engineered a Hierarchical Bayesian Logistic model on 3M+ Instacart transaction records with user-level and product-level random effects, producing calibrated reorder probabilities that hold up even for cold-start users. Developed a companion Bayesian Poisson model for cart-size prediction with full posterior predictive distributions and 95% credible intervals. Designed extensible frameworks using shrinkage priors and Negative Binomial likelihoods to handle the overdispersion and heavy tails.

Layoffs Dashboard Built an interactive dashboard tracking global tech layoffs, visualizing trends by sector, company stage, and geography - turning data into something navigable and genuinely useful for job seekers and labor economists alike.

I enjoy using R to optimize my data science workflow.

Oil Dependency & Price Shock Transmission Currently modeling how oil price shocks propagate through import dependent economies using VAR/SVAR frameworks in MATLAB. The goal is to trace the transmission mechanism from crude price to CPI to GDP response, with impulse response functions that tell a cleaner causal story than correlations alone.

I’m a bit evangelical about Bayesian statistics. As Charles Wheelan put it in Naked Statistics, it’s the mathematical formalization of something we already do - change our minds when we encounter new information. That stuck with me.

When I’m not working with data during the week, I’m usually following Formula 1 - less as a casual viewer, more as someone who can’t stop asking why. I like to dig into the technical side, what updates teams bring to the car, how a new floor or sidepod redesign translates into lap time etc. I follow strategy and data teams closely and occasionally I’ll pull together a bit of analysis on simulated or public data, but mostly about understanding the sport at a deeper level. It’s the perfect intersection of engineering, strategy, and decision making and honestly it’s where a lot of my intuition about optimization problems comes from.

Education

• M.A.S. in Data Science ∙ Illinois Institute of Technology ∙ 2026
• Bachelors in Computer Science ∙ Vellore Institute of Technology ∙ 2023

Lately …

Projects

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