Data Science Engineering Suite

Use this skill for reproducible data-science work from problem framing through evaluation and handoff. The center of gravity is not "pick the fanciest model." It is framing the decision, building train-serve-safe features, and producing decision-ready evidence.

ASCII Flow

data question
  |
  v
problem framing
  target + unit of analysis + leakage risks + decision/use case
  |
  v
data work
  source checks + EDA + feature logic + split strategy + baseline
  |
  v
model/evidence
  train or analyze + validate + interpret + quantify uncertainty
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  v
handoff
  report, notebook, model candidate, or production path to MLOps

Quick Reference

Need	Default Direction
reproducible Python workflow	uv plus scripts or git-friendly notebooks (marimo for reactive/diffable notebooks)
fast local analysis	DuckDB plus Polars (v1.x stable API as of 2026; pre-1.0 API-churn concerns no longer apply)
data contracts	Pandera or GX Core at dataset boundaries
tabular baseline	linear or logistic model plus tree-based candidate
feature engineering	explicit train-serve-safe transforms
unlabeled text corpus	embed -> UMAP -> HDBSCAN -> c-TF-IDF; LLM labels once per topic, never per document
tuning	Optuna only after the baseline is stable
evaluation	slices, threshold, calibration, uncertainty
handoff	model card, evaluation report, failure modes, monitoring expectations

When To Use This Skill

• exploring datasets and checking modelling feasibility
• designing feature pipelines and leakage controls
• choosing and comparing model families
• clustering unlabeled text and discovering topics before a taxonomy or labeling effort exists
• building reproducible experiment workflows
• producing evaluation reports, model cards, and handoff artifacts
• reviewing whether an experiment is genuinely ready for production handoff
• explaining responsible-AI modelling mechanics: fairness and intersectionality, privacy, interpretability, poisoning, memorization, human oversight, and environmental trade-offs
• designing general multimodal models: contrastive image-text learning, fusion, VQA/document/video systems, diffusion control, adaptation, and quality-latency trade-offs

Route Elsewhere

• serving, retraining automation, monitoring, or incident response -> ai-mlops
• forecasting and temporal validation -> ai-ml-timeseries
• lakehouse, ingestion, or streaming infrastructure -> data-lake-platform
• prompting, fine-tuning, or LLM-system design -> ai-llm or ai-rag

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Workflow

1. Frame the decision, target, baseline, and prediction timestamp before touching models.
2. Validate the dataset shape, ownership, and leakage risks.
3. Build the simplest viable baseline first.
4. Design point-in-time-correct features and compare stronger candidates only after the baseline is trustworthy.
5. Evaluate with the same split strategy, same metric definitions, and same compute budget.
6. Produce handoff artifacts with thresholds, calibration state, failure modes, and reproducibility notes.

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Core Rules

• write down the prediction timestamp explicitly
• do not trust random splits where time or entity leakage is plausible
• compare at least one simple baseline against one stronger candidate
• treat thresholding, calibration, and uncertainty as part of the decision
• keep data version, feature version, seed, and split logic reproducible
• hand off deployment-heavy questions early instead of rebuilding MLOps inside a notebook

Known Traps

• Using random train/test splits when time, entity, household, account, or session leakage is plausible.
• Building features with information that is only available after the prediction point, then calling the result "production ready."
• Tuning models before the baseline and metric definitions are stable.
• Reporting only AUC or one aggregate score while ignoring threshold choice, calibration, slice behavior, and operational tradeoffs.
• Letting notebook state become the real pipeline logic. Hidden ordering and cached state break reproducibility fast.
• A single feature with near-perfect standalone separation, or a metric a domain expert would find implausibly good — treat as a leakage bug report first, a discovery second (see references/eda-best-practices.md Expert Instincts).
• A correct time-based split with no group/entity split alongside it, when the same user/account/household recurs across time periods — time discipline alone does not stop entity leakage.
• Citing a library version, benchmark number, or API pattern from memory or an older tutorial without checking it against the currently installed version — tabular-ML tooling (Optuna, SHAP, scikit-learn, boosted-tree libraries) crosses breaking major versions inside a single year.

Common Anti-Patterns

• Treating a more complex model as progress when the baseline is not yet well understood.
• Optimizing benchmark metrics without checking train-serve parity for feature computation.
• Using global preprocessing shortcuts that leak label or split information across folds.
• Handing off a model without a model card, failure modes, threshold rationale, and monitoring expectations.

Pattern Chooser

Problem Shape	Direction
tabular or relational	baseline plus tree-based comparison
time-ordered forecasting	route to ai-ml-timeseries
classical text or embeddings plus classifier	stay here
unlabeled text, unknown themes, topic discovery	stay here; see references/text-clustering-topic-modeling.md
LLM workflow, prompting, or RAG	route to ai-llm or ai-rag
deployment, monitoring, retraining	route to ai-mlops
ingestion or lakehouse architecture	route to data-lake-platform
responsible-AI concepts and modelling trade-offs	stay here; route operational controls to ai-mlops and measurement/red teaming to ai-evals
multimodal representations, fusion, VQA/document/video, diffusion mechanics	stay here; route production and evaluation to ai-mlops and ai-evals

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Core Patterns

End-to-end DS lifecycle

• problem framing and baseline
• dataset scan and contracts
• EDA and leakage review
• feature plan
• baseline versus candidate comparison
• evaluation with slices and thresholds
• production handoff package

Reproducible workspace

• uv and explicit dependencies
• script-first or git-friendly notebook entrypoints — for reactive, git-diffable notebooks consider marimo as an alternative to Jupyter; marimo is reactive (dependent cells auto-rerun), stores notebooks as plain Python scripts, and eliminates hidden-state ordering issues
• fixed seeds and explicit split logic
• logged dataset and feature assumptions

Feature engineering and contracts

• numeric, categorical, text, and time-based transforms
• point-in-time availability checks
• reusable encoders and documented freshness assumptions

Evaluation and decision readiness

• primary metric plus guardrails
• threshold strategy
• calibration and uncertainty handling
• slice analysis and qualitative error review

Autonomous experimentation

Use agent-driven experiment loops only when the metric is explicit, the search space is bounded, and each run is cheap enough to keep or revert automatically.

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Templates

• assets/project/template-standard.md
• assets/project/template-quick.md
• assets/features/template-feature-engineering.md
• assets/eda/template-eda.md
• assets/evaluation/template-evaluation-report.md
• assets/evaluation/template-model-card.md
• assets/review/experiment-review-template.md

Scripts

Script	Purpose
scripts/ml_toolkit.py	Generates model cards, leakage checks, and model-quality reports from a model-spec JSON
scripts/leakage_scan.py	Static leakage scanner for ML feature/target column specs (JSON/JSONL). Flags time-leakage, target-leakage, and ID-leakage anti-patterns from column metadata. Exit code 1 if issues found.

Typical usage:

python scripts/ml_toolkit.py card --input data/sample-model-spec.json
python scripts/ml_toolkit.py leakage --input data/sample-model-spec.json
python scripts/ml_toolkit.py report --input data/sample-model-spec.json --output report.md

See scripts/README.md for the input format and leakage-check logic.

Navigation

Core references

• references/eda-best-practices.md
• references/feature-engineering-patterns.md
• references/data-contracts-lineage.md
• references/modelling-patterns.md
• references/evaluation-patterns.md
• references/class-imbalance-patterns.md
• references/hyperparameter-optimization.md
• references/text-clustering-topic-modeling.md — modular embed/UMAP/HDBSCAN/c-TF-IDF pipeline, representation-model reranking, per-topic (not per-document) LLM labeling, and when to prefer plain k-means
• references/interpretability-explainability.md
• references/responsible-ai-mechanics.md — fairness/intersectionality, differential privacy, explainability, poisoning/federated learning, re-identification, watermarking, human oversight/appeals, copyright/memorization, and environmental trade-offs
• references/multimodal-modeling.md — CLIP/SigLIP objectives, fusion, VQA/document/video systems, diffusion control/diversity/acceleration, adaptation, latency, and cost
• references/reproducibility-checklist.md
• references/llm-data-pipeline.md — LLM-from-scratch data pipelines (dedup, quality filtering, synthetic mixing, decontamination); route here first for corpus curation work
• references/feature-freshness-streaming.md
• references/production-feedback-loops.md
• references/ml-diagrams.md — Mermaid diagram catalog for classical ML (k-means, logistic regression, decision trees, collaborative filtering) and neural net architectures (MLP, RNN, CNN, Transformer); for embedding in docs, READMEs, PR descriptions

Data and external references

• data/sources.json
• data/sample-model-spec.json

Related Skills

• ai-architecture-advisor — when to use trees vs deep learning vs LLM (decide before building)
• ai-mlops
• ai-ml-timeseries
• data-lake-platform
• ai-llm
• ai-rag
• huggingface-datasets — now in the external huggingface-skills: plugin

Fact-Checking

• Known bugs, regressions, framework/compiler/runtime footguns, and version-specific crash or workaround guidance must be verified against current primary web sources before being treated as current fact.
• Verify current library capabilities, version-sensitive tooling advice, and benchmark claims before final answers.
• Prefer official docs for fast-moving tools and model libraries.
• If web access is unavailable, keep tool recommendations marked as unverified where freshness matters.

Learnings Loop

Before applying this skill on a non-trivial task, read learnings.consolidated.md in this directory (and learnings.md if present).

After applying it, if you encountered a pattern worth remembering, a mistake worth preventing, or a domain fact that surprised you, append one dated bullet to learnings.md via agents-skills-feedback-loop/scripts/append_learning.py. Do not modify SKILL.md itself.