Eliasse TIAO

Experience

Professional roles

4 professional roles spanning energy forecasting, banking risk, socioeconomic data science, and field research across Africa.

Feb 2026 — Jul 2026

Data Scientist, Machine Learning

Wattzo · South Africa (Remote)

Impact: Built production energy forecasting system for solar PV and consumption. Trained dual-regime LSTM ensemble with conformal prediction for 12-site network.

  • Developed probabilistic forecasting pipeline (quantile regression + conformal prediction) for solar and grid demand.
  • Designed SHAP-based explainability layer for DSO operators to understand model decisions in real-time.
  • Reduced forecast error bands by 18% vs. naive baseline; enabled safer grid balancing in low-solar periods.
  • Deployed to production serving 12 independent solar sites across Southern Africa.

Mar 2025 — Jul 2025

Data Scientist, Enterprise Risk

Afriland First Bank · Benin (Remote)

Impact: Built credit risk scorecard for retail lending. Model deployed across 15 branches; 82% precision on high-risk flagging.

  • Engineered 40+ features from raw transaction and applicant data; selected top 12 using L1 regularization.
  • Trained logistic regression with threshold optimization for precision/recall tradeoff (F1 = 0.82).
  • Backtested on 3 years of historical loan data; identified 80% of future defaults 6 months ahead.
  • Built interactive risk dashboard in Excel VBA; stakeholder training for 40+ loan officers.

Apr 2025 — Jun 2025

Data Scientist, Econometrics Internship

National Institute of Statistics (NIS) · Cameroon

Impact: SME survival prediction — deployed as policy dashboard. Identified 80% of enterprises failing 12–24 months ahead.

  • Built survival models (CatBoost AUC = 0.884, Random Survival Forest) on 15K enterprise records + 5 years panel.
  • Integrated econometric Lasso feature selection with ML classification; achieved stable, interpretable risk scores.
  • Designed interactive policy dashboard in Shiny; used by Ministry of Small & Medium Enterprises for targeting support.
  • Advised on data infrastructure for national enterprise census (cleaned 200K records, resolved duplicates).

Jun 2024 — Sep 2024

Field Officer, Socioeconomic Survey

ISSEA-CEMAC · Cameroon

Contribution: Survey design and fieldwork for SME dataset. Trained 8 enumerators; quality assurance on 600+ household interviews.

  • Designed survey instrument for enterprise census (questionnaire piloting, sampling strategy).
  • Supervised 8 field enumerators across urban and rural zones; monitored data quality in real-time.
  • Conducted 600+ household interviews; resolved inconsistencies and recoded raw data for analysis.
  • Compiled and documented final enterprise dataset (15K records, metadata, data dictionary).