Brian Blitz

Data Analyst · Las Vegas, NV

I build interpretable, deployable ML systems for high-stakes industries. I've spent my career in environments where analytical errors have real consequences — a restaurant lives or dies on margins, an NGO allocates scarce resources under legal constraints, a sportsbook loses money to customers who are smarter than the line. That domain grounding distinguishes this portfolio from candidates who have credentials but not context.

Portfolio — 8 Projects, South Florida Market Focus

Healthcare · Finance · Supply Chain · Database/NLP · Real Estate · Tourism · Agriculture · Insurance

Healthcare

Synthetic Hospital Database

17-table, research-grounded synthetic hospital database with a generate-validate-repair data quality pipeline — no PHI, built from peer-reviewed clinical/operational schemas.

MySQLSQLAlchemyTableau
Finance

NLP Market Sentiment & Bot Manipulation

Weak sentiment-return correlation turns out to be the interesting result — bot prevalence appears to suppress the organic sentiment signal in equity Twitter data.

NLPGranger CausalityStatsmodels
Supply Chain

Rossmann Demand Forecasting

ARIMA vs. LightGBM on retail demand — documenting where ARIMA's stationarity assumptions break on promotion- and holiday-driven sales data.

ARIMALightGBMTableau
Database / NLP

SQL Analytics Engine with NLP Query Interface

Text-to-SQL interface over a normalized analytical schema — plain-English questions translated to validated SQL via an LLM query layer.

SQLLangChainClaude API
Real Estate

Miami Property Price Estimator

Geospatial price model where flood-zone risk and coastal proximity are first-class features — VE zones expected to show a premium despite highest risk.

GeoPandasLightGBMSHAPPlotly Dash
Tourism

Hotel Review Sentiment & Reputation Dashboard

Multilingual (English + Spanish) sentiment and topic modeling across Miami/Orlando hotel reviews — reputation scoring and competitor benchmarking.

BERTopicXLM-RoBERTa
Agriculture

Florida Crop Yield Forecasting

Weather-driven yield forecasting for Florida citrus or strawberry — frost days and rainfall expected to dominate feature importance.

USDA NASSNOAALightGBM
Insurance

Florida Hurricane Claim Severity Predictor

Per-property Annual Expected Loss scoring from FEMA NFIP claims and NOAA storm tracks — Florida accounts for 79% of US homeowner insurance lawsuits.

FastAPISHAPGeoPandas

Background

This portfolio bridges a decade of experience in high-stakes operational environments — hospitality, humanitarian services, and financial risk — with a formal data science skill set built through an M.S. in Data Analytics and applied project work. Two years as an equity trader at William Hill / Caesars Sportsbook, including market analysis and data-driven presentations to leadership, is the most directly transferable professional data science experience and grounds several of the projects above, particularly the market sentiment and risk-modeling work.