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Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why

#121
maybe i am missing something here... i really don't know.

it might not be rigourous, but for standard, deep neural networks its intuitively obvious enough that you can reinvent the idea from scratch in your bedroom in a time before the internet just by getting a vague description of the idea and thinking about how it /could/ work.

proving convergence may be difficult, but its not particularly challenging to see why it happens imo. :/

a lot of the things the article points at are utterly irrelevant to the subject. e.g. sigmoid functions, depth of networks.

i think there are some bold baseless claims here - for instance linearly interpolating data points is pretty simple as a way to approximate a function, and its not hard to see how neurons can provide this with linear activation functions and some very naive back propagation. (e.g. evenly dividing error and correcting weights towards the correct result)

if this didn't converge /that/ would be surprising.

Re: Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why

#124

In addition to "We need a cluster for deep learning", the second most popular mostly untrue thing I hear is "We have no idea how neural networks learn". However, there are many papers that explore various ways to make a network learn, and they keep improving on performance, suggesting they're on to something . There are also many papers that discuss possible theoretical implications of experimental results. But what…

> What would a satisfactory "why" even look like exactly?

Before deep learning happened, neural networks used to be popular for regression and interpolation problems. For a long time, our understanding of how they worked wasn't much better than our current understanding of how deep learning works.

In 1994, Radford Neal showed [1] that weight-decay neural networks were in fact an approximation to Bayesian inference on a Gaussian process prior over the space of possible functions. Amongst other benefits, this allowed better approximations to be utilised, and essentially (along with the advent of SVMs) marked the end the first neural network era.

Something like that is what I would consider a satisfactory "why"

[1] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~radford/pin.abstract.html

Re: Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why

#125
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how old you are, but what exactly are you expectations when you state Data science is improving, but you might be surprised how slowly. We have machines that can categorise pictures better that humans. In 2011 that seemed completely impossible.

We also have history books. The history of AI is funny.

And for the first fifty years of AI research, the process more or less goes:

1) An AI researcher decides that problem X is hard enough that solving it represents intelligence 2) Researcher develops an algorithm to solve X 3) Now that we have that algorithm, it's no longer an AI problem

When you teach a computer to play chess, it's just depth first search with a few heuristics added in. When you write an expert system to evaluate mortgage loans, it's just following a if-then script.

Machine learning techniques though, seem to to have stayed solidly in the AI camp.

Re: Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why

#126
post #44
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how old you are, but what exactly are you expectations when you state Data science is improving, but you might be surprised how slowly. We have machines that can categorise pictures better that humans. In 2011 that seemed completely impossible.

Age is unrelated to wisdom and I'm talking about the full experience. A Google Image search for "Wonder Wheel" (the famous Coney Island Ferris Wheel) shows this spoked diagram within the first page of results: http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2011/07/... Also this year, Google Photos classified black people as gorillas. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/01/google-apologi... Consumers are r…

I'm not commenting at all on wisdom, merely on how quickly time passes for people of different ages. 5 years seems like a long time for a 15 year old, and hardly anything for a 50 year old.

The first result for me is https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Wonder_W...

Looks good to me?

As for the gorilla incident, I don't think anyone is claiming that errors don't occur, and it's very fair to say that particular error was very embarrassing for Google. It's interesting how children make the same kind of embarrassing mistakes, eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/24me24/embarrass...

Re: Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why

#127
post #118
post #83

My super-hand-waving explanation of why machine learning works: MNIST is a handwritten digit database. Each 784-pixel image (28x28) corresponds to a digit from 0 to 9. As a pure mathematical construction, there are at most 2^784 inputs possible, and a small number of possible outputs. So if you have 784 completely different ways of analyzing the image, and you combine them in the right ways, you will get roughly an a…

So if you have 784 completely different ways of analyzing the image[...] Interesting intuitions; but if by "ways of analyzing the image" you mean functions, there are an awful lot more than 784...

I mean, there are zillions of different functions, but no more than 784 linearly independent versions. (I mean, not technically since the functions aren't linear, but at any specific point on the functions, the linear approximations have no more than 784 independent bases).

Re: Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why

#128

>In the last 15 years or so, researchers have created a number of tools to probe the geometry of these hidden structures. For example, you might build a model of the surface by first zooming in at many different points. At each point, you would place a drop of virtual ink on the surface and watch how it spread out. It sounds to me like this 'ink drop' is a metaphor to explain some state-of-the-art dimensionality redu…

This reminded me of this paper on using deep autoencoders as a generative model: http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5023-generalized-denoising-auto-... I don't think it's exactly a right analogy, but there's something there about the local flow of MCMC locally describing the manifold structure, and thus generating it globally.

Re: Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why

#129
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely not the case for general neural networks, though.

If gradient descent is working reliably, the problem is convex. See the sibling comments for the intuition for large dimensional spaces.

"The problem is convex" and "the algorithm is unlikely to get stuck in a local minimum on realistic problems" are very different things.

Re: Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why

#130
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If gradient descent is working reliably, the problem is convex. See the sibling comments for the intuition for large dimensional spaces.

"The problem is convex" and "the algorithm is unlikely to get stuck in a local minimum on realistic problems" are very different things.

Right. Hence the word 'reliably'.
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