Mark van der Broek’s Blog
Notes on applied machine learning, operations research, and its applications to the electricity market.
About Me
Programming has been my hobby, since I’m 12 years old. I’m a ML engineer with over 6 years of experience in the electricity market. I’ve worked on forecasts for renewable energy assets (such as solar plants and wind mills) by integrating (massive!) spatiotemporal datasets, and market data forecasts.
Recently, I’ve started working with tabular foundational models (such as TabICL and TabPFN) that finally manages to beat boosting methods for time-series and tabular data. Another hot topic that keeps me busy is how LLMs continue to further disrupt our lives. However, I believe that these tools are most effective when the human is in control and uses LLMs to upskill. That’s also why I’m a huge advocate for the SolveIt method (have a look if you’re curious!).
Latest Posts
| Title | Description | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Building a home battery controller in the Netherlands with Home Assistant | I show how you can build a home battery controller in the Netherlands with Home Assistant and EMHASS | May 26, 2026 |
| Excess Mortality in 2020 | Analysis of mortality dataset provided by HMD. | May 26, 2020 |
| Logistic Regression in PyTorch from Scratch | An explanation of the logistic regression from the ground-up. | Nov 8, 2019 |
| Common Deep Learning Training Pitfalls | Typical mistakes and pitfalls when facing machine or deep learning problems. | Nov 7, 2019 |
| Airplane Classifier with Fast.ai Library | Learn to distinguish Airbus A320s from Boeing 737 using the fast.ai software. | Nov 6, 2019 |
| Custom Data Splitter Function in Python | Splitting a folder of photos in a random subset of training and testing photos is not readily available as a program. This little program… | Oct 31, 2019 |
| Train XOR Logic Gate in Neural Network | Learning to train a XOR logic gate with bare Python and Numpy. | Sep 26, 2018 |
| Map Plots in R in a Tidyverse Way | I show how you can plot your own map in R using a few lines of code using a pipe-based workflow | Sep 19, 2018 |