Saining Zhang

Data Science & Analytics Lead                                                                                                                                    08/2020 – 03/2024

Yo-ren Ltd., Shanghai, China,

• Owned the full data science lifecycle (data management, visualization, analysis, modeling, stakeholder communication) for multiple business lines across Retail and Consumer Goods.
• Leveraged Python, R, SQL, and Tableau to gather, clean, and visualize large datasets from diverse sources (in-app behavior, purchase history, demographic data).
• Developed and deployed machine learning and statistical models (Regression, Classification, Clustering, PCA, Bayesian Models, and Time Series) to inform strategic decisions on:
  • Customer Activation & Retention: Targeted promotions, campaigns, and messages that grew overall membership from 20M to 50M and monthly active users from 3M to 5M in 3 years.
  • Store Expansion: launched a product that identified optimal store locations leading to successful expansion from 2K to 5K convenience store locations nationwide in 3 years.
  • Product Recommendation: used Weighted Analysis and Association Rules for recommendation at multiple levels, resulting in a 22% increase in recommended product sales and a 4% overall uplift.
• Created and launched a Social Listening Analysis product using NLP (sentiment analysis, trend detection and topic modeling) on millions of social posts, which drove a 4% increase in company revenue.
• Led cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, and operations teams for model deployment, including a K-means customer segmentation model that improved repurchase rates by 25% for an eyewear client.
• Communicated insights and actionable recommendations to executives, guiding data-driven decision-making for improved product offerings and go-to-market strategies.
• Led and mentored a team of 5 data analysts and scientists, and managed recruitment and onboarding of new-hires.

Senior Data Scientist                                                                                                                                                    05/2019 – 07/2020

ISINONET Inc., Shanghai, China

• Engineered and preprocessed complex financial datasets (demographic, transactional, credit, loan) to enable robust modeling (missing value imputation, outlier handling, transformation, one-hot encoding, imbalanced data resampling).
• Developed and optimized a Logistic Regression model to identify high net worth customer segments (AUC > 0.85), reducing marketing costs by over 80%.
• Translated ML results into concise reporting and dashboards for executives and sales teams, ensuring clear understanding and fostering adoption of data-driven strategies.

Research Analyst -> Research Project Director                                                                                                     02/2013 – 12/2018

Escalent Inc. (Formerly Morpace Inc.), Farmington Hills, MI, US / Shanghai, China

• Directed end-to-end project management of Brand Tracking Studies for Ford Motor Company in over 10 global markets, insights contributed to a 10% increase in global revenue.
• Designed and implemented sampling frameworks to ensure accurate representation of target demographics and alignment with project objectives.
• Combined survey data with 3rd party data sources, performed advanced data analysis with SAS and R to track KPIs, and conducted ad-hoc analysis to identify root cause for abnormal results. 
• Conducted statistical analysis (Z-Test, T-Test) to test for significance between groups.
• Created reports and client-facing presentations to communicate business recommendations that resulted in revamped brand strategy and reduced consumer opinion gap to market leader by 15%.

Master of Science, Marketing Research                                                                                                                        09/2011 - 12/2012

Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, US                                                                                                                                  

Bachelor of Science, Chemistry                                                                                                                                        09/2007 - 06/2011

Wuhan University, Wuhan, China