Saran Ahluwalia: Applied Research Data Scientist

I am a former neuroscientist and educator who served both District of Columbia and Montgomery County in Maryland. Most recently, I have spent the last five years working as a data scientist, machine learning researcher, and algorithms engineer working across national security, finance, hospitality, endpoint security, sales, and product measurement, and, most recently, quantitative finance and real estate.

Along the way, I was privileged to work with Dr. Eric Laber at North Carolina State University’s Department of Statistics.

I am now serving as the founding data scientist at Acre Labs. My research is supervised by Andrew Toby, and John Brodie Gay - both formerly of Unison. My work spans four major themes:

1. New market research - a focus on macroeconomic forecasting of population growth, wage growth, and demand for housing. I am also working on modeling changes in land share in select municipalities in candidate states.
2. Quantitative finance:
   • arbitrage pricing models for buying versus renting
   • Fair market valuation and uncertainty quantification in real estate pricing - using a combination of least squares estimators and Random Forest regression models
   • Home Price Appreciation (HPA) index creation using a combination of repeat sales and hedonic methodologies
3. Real estate economics - spatial autoregressive models to measure (i) effects of delinquency on neighboring home prices; (ii) SFR investors’ effects on neighborhood home price changes
4. Modeling total returns of portfolios for various investment classes - including Single Family Residential and Multi-family residential investments

Herein you will find a shortlist of research projects, publications, talks, and my CV.