Benjamin Elbers
Senior Data Scientist
Hamburg, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Elbers is a Senior Data Scientist at Spotify with 16 years of experience blending social science rigor and modern data engineering to translate complex social phenomena into actionable insights. He holds a PhD in Sociology and an MA in Statistics from Columbia University and moves fluidly between R, Python, Julia, SQL and Stata to build reproducible analyses, novel methods and expressive visualizations. Benjamin is an active open-source author—maintaining R packages like tidylog and segregation—and has contributed backend features and robust test coverage to the widely used modelsummary package, showing a strong focus on quality and usability. His work spans machine learning, regression and network analysis, and he brings a researcher’s curiosity to product-facing problems at scale. Based in Hamburg, he combines academic depth with production discipline, often surfacing subtle sociological patterns that standard pipelines miss.
16 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at Columbia University in the City of New YorkThe Graduate Center, City University of New YorkBachelor of Arts - BA, Bachelor of Arts - BA at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
Github Skills (5)
statistical-models10
r10
testing10
test-automation8
package-development8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
vincentarelbundock/modelsummary
May 2021 - May 2021
Beautiful and customizable model summaries in R.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer/Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer/Test Automation EngineerContributions:4 reviews, 16 commits, 9 PRs in 7 days
Contributions summary:Benjamin contributed to the `modelsummary` R package by implementing new functionalities like the `dsummary` shortcut function and the `datasummary_crosstab` convenience function. They also modified existing code, specifically improving error messages and adjusting the output of variance-covariance matrices. Furthermore, the user's work includes extensive additions and modifications to the test suite, adding new tests and refining existing ones to cover different model types and scenarios, which demonstrates a focus on ensuring code quality and reliability.
r-packagestatisticshypothesis-testingbookdownregression-models
elbersb/segregation
Apr 2018 - Sep 2022
R package to calculate entropy-based segregation indices, with a focus on the Mutual Information Index (M) and Theil’s Information Index (H)
Contributions:10 releases, 185 commits, 2 PRs in 4 years 5 months
r-packageentropyindicesindexrstats
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