Michael Ellis

Walmart – Bentonville, AR

• Led development of a production causal inference library using DynamicDML (EconML), identifying ~$100M in incremental revenue opportunity through optimized sales-meeting targeting for Walmart Marketplace partners.
• Nearly doubled per-meeting ROI, enabling smarter sales prioritization across Walmart Marketplace partners.

The Home Depot – Remote – Bentonville, AR

• Technical lead for voice and text customer-support systems serving nearly 100 million contacts annually. The systems used LLMs, RAG, fine-tuning, NLP, and NLU.
• Built a RAG-based FAQ agent that expanded the questions addressable through automation. An A/B test estimated a 4% increase in containable conversations.
• Built an experimentation framework for hypothesis definition, sample-size planning, and automated analysis. It enabled the company’s first A/B test in a conversational experience.
• Lead inventor on the Machine Learning-based User Intent Determination patent.

The Home Depot – Remote – Bentonville, AR

• Identified a product-rental use case in the automated phone system projected to automate 500,000 calls and save $5 million per year by reducing contact-center transfers.
• Fine-tuned automatic speech-recognition models, improving speech-to-text accuracy by 45% and saving $1.3 million annually.
• Built a type-ahead system that reduced text entry for contact-center employees.

Black Hills Energy – Fayetteville, AR

• Built a forecasting system for millions of customer natural-gas time series and improved forecast accuracy by 14%.
• Built usage-data pipelines and worked with NOAA to ingest more than 2.2 billion weather observations for the forecasting models.
• Deployed R Shiny applications for monitoring forecasts and business metrics, cutting manual analysis time by 50%.

University of Arkansas – Fayetteville, AR

• Research: Computational Bayesian Methodology for massive high-dimensional datasets
• Advanced coursework: Probability Theory, Statistical Methods, Bayesian Data Analysis, Computational Statistics, Real Analysis, Measure Theory, Differential Equations

University of Arkansas – Fayetteville, AR

University of Arkansas – Fayetteville, AR

University of Arkansas – Fayetteville, AR

• Taught two sections of approximately 40 students each semester. The course covered probability, hypothesis testing, and regression.

University of Arkansas – Fayetteville, AR

• Taught three sections of approximately 30 students each semester.

Student Course Evaluations

• "Michael is a great teacher who cares about his students and always tries to help. He thoroughly enjoys stats and helps you apply it to the real world."
• "Michael is very good at making difficult things understandable and he's also very concerned with how everyone is doing, which is awesome!"