41–50 of 200 posts
Generally speaking, I think if you know your data relationships you don't need ML. If you don't, it can be especially useful.
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ML courses often start with linear regression, and if you build up complicated polynomials to find a nonintuitive model of your problem, I would definitely consider that machine learning.
I wouldn't. I'd call it "basic computational statistics." But I think I might be in the minority on that.
It looks like that's not the standard view, though.
Amazon Personalization. We use ML/Deep Learning for customer to product recommendations and product to product recommendations. For years we used only algorithms based on basic statistics but we've found places where the machine learned models out perform the simpler models. Here is our blog post and related GitHub repo: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/generating-recommendat... https://github.com/amznlabs/amazo…
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It's interesting to me that with all the ML hype, it's still not clear what constitutes ML. A basic k-means or naive Bayes approach will show up in ML textbooks, but those aren't clearly different from "use some statistics to make a prediction". There's an interesting group of marginal approaches that have existed as-is for years, but have increasingly focused their branding on machine learning as its profile has ris…
> but those aren't clearly different from "use some statistics to make a prediction" You can reduce 90% of ML to this. Even neural networks are based on statistics. If I have to draw a line between statistics and ML is that ML learns, it means it can predict things, however statistics only gives you information about the data you have. But for sure statistics and ML overlap a lot.
If you ask me for the most likely new value for a dataset, I won't know. But if I graph a few things and then write a function to spit back the current mean or median, is that machine learning?
I'm not trying to be snarky there, I agree that the bulk of ML tools are fundamentally just statistical tricks with some layer of abstraction. As a result, I have a lot of trouble knowing how much abstraction justifies the ML title. I see some people using "statistics to produce unintuitive solutions" as a standard, but that just begs that we ask unintuitive to who?
I think a lot of the real benefits from ML "at work" is more in just cleaning of data and running through the gauntlet of simplest regressions (before jumping onto something more magical whose outputs and decision making process you can't exactly explain to someone). I would classify something like this blog post as ML, would you? http://stackoverflow.blog/2016/11/How-Do-Developers-in-New-Y...
When people talk about the growth (or sometimes 'excess') of ML solutions these days, I always wonder about this. A basic linear regression probably isn't ML, a backprop neural net clearly is, but somewhere between the two is a very fuzzy line between "statistics and data cleaning" and "actually machine learning". I think a lot of people have just pushed the ML angle of an already-reasonable approach to tie into that…