Hincal Topcuoglu
Istanbul, Turkey
Email: hincal@topcuoglu.me
LinkedIn | GitHub | Twitter

Professional Summary

Experienced Data Scientist with 13 years of expertise in statistics and data-driven solutions across e-commerce, telecommunications, banking, travel, and aviation sectors. Skilled in machine learning, big data, and cloud technologies. Known for creativity, innovation, and close collaboration with business teams to translate needs into actionable data science solutions.

Experience Highlights

• Data Science Consultant, Intellium (Turkish Airlines) (May 2024 – Apr 2025): Developed chatbot using Llama 38B and Lang Chain; built income forecasting models improving savings by 12-13%.
• Data Science Consultant, Yapı Kredi Bank (Sep 2023 – Feb 2024): Worked on default rate measurement for customer groups.
• Senior Data Scientist, Enuygun.com (Dec 2020 – Jun 2023): Led data science team; developed smart ranking, anomaly detection, text mining, image similarity, recommendation engines, and sales forecasting tools.
• Senior Data Scientist, Cerebro (Sep 2019 – Mar 2020): Created clustering-based click prediction models improving performance by 10-12%.
• Senior Data Scientist, MilliyetEmlak.com (Mar 2017 – Jan 2019): Designed churn prediction, agent segmentation, house price prediction, and built data lake on AWS.
• Senior DWH Engineer, Vodafone (Jun 2016 – Mar 2017): Managed ETL and big data lake projects.
• Data Scientist, Turk Telekom (Jul 2013 – Oct 2015): Delivered price optimization, churn prediction, risk scorecard, and customer segmentation models.
• Financial Reporting Specialist, Seker Bank (Oct 2012 – Jul 2013): Prepared financial reports.

Education

• PhD in Statistics, Yildiz Technical University (2021 – 2025), GPA: 3.71
• MSc in Statistics, Yildiz Technical University (2018 – 2021), GPA: 3.93
• BSc in Statistics, Ege University (2005 – 2011), GPA: 2.41

Technical Skills

Python, R, SQL, Spark, Docker, AWS, GCP, UNIX

Selected Publications

• Determining the Weights of the Least Squares for NonLinear DataSets by Entropy Measures (MSc Thesis)
• Image Similarity for Hotel Images, IOCEANS 2021
• Entropy Measures in Weighted Least Squares, UYIK 2020
• Preventing Image Duplication, ICENTE 2021
• Sales Prediction for Bus Tickets, ICENTE 2022
• Hotel Recommendation System, ICONSAD 2022
• AI-Based Budget Sales Prediction, ARACONF 2023