Personalized and Aspiration-Oriented Career Path Recommendation

Fulfilling career aspirations is important for growth of employee and organization. We propose a data driven methodology to recommend personalized career path for a given aspirant's career path and aspirations. The pro-posed method uses the career path similarity (CPS) between aspirant's career and candidate career path, and 'aspirational similarity' (AS) between aspiration and candidate career paths to find suitable career path. CPS ensures personalized recommendation while AS ensures aspiration fulfillment. We defined two methods to compute the CPS between career paths which are (a) domain knowledge driven (DKD) and, (b) unsupervised representation learning and alignment (URLA) based, along with different AS measures. The DKD based similarity is defined in the terms of features extracted and summarized over career paths. In the URLA, we use the sequence of event names present in the career paths of the employees to learn the embedding for each event name. In URLA we use learned embedding vector of the career path event names and as-sociated event attributes (skill cluster and domain) to find the best alignment between two career paths. We hypothesized that relative position of event names in the sequence represents semantics of event name and that can be learned. We use LSTM neural network to learn the embedding vector of each career event name. We also define the matching method to compute the AS be-tween aspiration and career path in both proposed methods. We combine CPS and AS to rank available 'candidate career paths' of employees to find the suitable one. We get better DCG value in URLA as compare to DKD. We also showed that ranking are coherent using both the methods. URLA method is better since it does not require domain knowledge to model the similarity and includes temporal aspect by optimal Levenshtein alignment using weighted cosine distance.

What Makes a Peer? Valuation-Anchored Similarity in Private Markets

As more investors contemplate private markets and contend with limited transparency, sparse disclosures, and infrequent transactions, identifying economically meaningful peer companies for comparison is a fundamental challenge for valuation, due diligence, portfolio construction, and risk management. We propose an ensemble tree-based supervised similarity learning framework that defines company similarity through the lens of market valuation rather than static feature matching or semantic descriptions. Specifically, we train a CatBoost gradient-boosted decision tree model on observed private company valuations and derive a valuation-aware similarity metric from importance-weighted leaf-node co-occurrences across the ensemble. The similarity metric captures shared valuation drivers while accommodating nonlinear relationships, mixed data types, and pervasive missing data common in private markets. Using a global private-market universe of approximately 270,000 companies, including more than 53,000 firms with observed or derivable post-money valuations spanning multiple industries, geographies, and deal stages, we demonstrate that the proposed similarity framework improves upon traditional distance-based and text-embedding-based approaches in downstream k-nearest-neighbor valuation tasks in the evaluated industry groups, while retaining case-based explainability.

Doing well with less! On Sampling Techniques for Empirical Pairwise Loss Estimation/Minimization

Many machine learning problems, including similarity learning, ranking, and clustering, rely on empirical pairwise loss functions whose quadratic computational cost quickly becomes prohibitive at scale. We demonstrate how a frugal approach that retains only a fraction of the available information on pairs can achieve estimation or optimization performance comparable to that obtained by using all pairs, by leveraging survey sampling techniques. A central finding, supported by both theory and experiments, is that such sampling plans must target pairs directly rather than individual observations. In particular, for pairwise losses between high-dimensional vectors such as embeddings in vision or graph learning, assigning higher inclusion probabilities to informative pairs using suitable auxiliary information yields performance close to full pairwise evaluation, providing a principled and theoretically grounded trade-off between accuracy and computational cost.