Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Certification
Timeline
Generic
Perlate Diala

Perlate Diala

Johannesburg

Summary

Specialist Data Scientist with 5+ years of experience delivering high-impact machine learning solutions. Proven track record of leading high-impact projects—from predictive modeling to fraud detection—using advanced techniques such as time series forecasting, anomaly detection, and Fourier transformation models. Skilled in translating complex data into strategic insights, influencing product direction, and mentoring data teams

Overview

6
6
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification

Work History

Specialist Data Scientist

ABSA
01.2025 - Current
  • Salaried Income & Loan Alignment: Developed a Fourier transformation-based model to infer salary dates from transactional data, enabling optimized personal loan debit dates—reducing late payment misalignment.
  • Financial Distress Detection: Designed an anomaly detection system to identify customers with irregular income patterns (e.g., missed salaries), triggering early risk interventions for 100+ high-priority accounts monthly.
  • ATM Risk Pattern Detection: Built Python-based spatial and network analytics (Folium, NetworkX) to pinpoint high-risk ATM locations using geospatial mapping and community detection, reducing vulnerability incidents.

Senior Data Scientist

ABSA
05.2023 - 12.2024
  • Participate in design thinking processes to determine and confirm hypotheses, priority questions, data challenges, and related metrics to be solved.
  • Built graph network models analyzing cell/ID/address/airtime links, exposing 3+ fraud syndicates and contributing to 5+ regulatory reports (SARs). Reduced false alerts
  • Developed an NLP model to reclassify customer complaints, resulting in a 25% increase in accuracy.
  • Designed anomaly detection to understand customers who are not behaving similarly to their peers.

Data Scientist Consultant

Deloitte Consulting
07.2022 - 04.2023
  • Create and implementing new revenue forecasting models to in GCP platform increase company productivity.
  • Develop intricate machine learning time-series algorithms to forecast data pecks utilization.
  • Tested and validated models for accuracy of predictions in outcomes of interest.
  • Build model monitoring dashboards (segmentation, smart capex, credit scoring, device financing).
  • Use of classification algorithms, similarity measures and topic models for document summarization to identify whether targets reported were met.
  • Development of unsupervised machine learning models for customer segmentation problem for telecommunication client.

Data Scientist - Analyst

Deloitte Consulting
01.2020 - 06.2022
  • Brainstormed with data personnel to define data modeling standards for projects.
  • Assisted with creating and updating training materials for personnel use.
  • Applied statistical techniques to interpret key points from gathered data.
  • Developed polished visualizations to share results of data analyses.
  • Maintained schedules of client interactions and project delivery dates.

Data Scientist Intern

CSIR
12.2019 - 01.2020
  • Implemented various data mining tools to extract and to process and analyses roughly a million tweets to determine tweets that are relevant to election.
  • Implemented topic modelling algorithms to understand broad themes that exist within this tweet corpus.

Education

Master of Science - Data Science

University of Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa
07.2020

Bachelor of Science Honours - Statistics

University of Limpopo
Polokwane, South Africa
12.2017

Bachelor of Science - Mathematical Science

University of Limpopo
Polokwane, South Africa
12.2016

Skills

  • Languages: Python, R, SAS, PySpark
  • Visualization: PowerBI, Seaborn, Plotly, Google Data Studio
  • Big Data: Hadoop, PySpark
  • Data Analytics: Exploratory Data Analysis, Feature Engineering, Statistical Modelling, Market Basket Analysis
  • ML and AI: Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Graph Networks
  • Tools and Platforms: DataRobot, Git

Certification

Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Scientist Associate

Timeline

Specialist Data Scientist

ABSA
01.2025 - Current

Senior Data Scientist

ABSA
05.2023 - 12.2024

Data Scientist Consultant

Deloitte Consulting
07.2022 - 04.2023

Data Scientist - Analyst

Deloitte Consulting
01.2020 - 06.2022

Data Scientist Intern

CSIR
12.2019 - 01.2020

Master of Science - Data Science

University of Witwatersrand

Bachelor of Science Honours - Statistics

University of Limpopo

Bachelor of Science - Mathematical Science

University of Limpopo

Similar Profiles

CREATE PROFILE
Perlate Diala