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You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

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Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#121

Post by sverhagen »

didibus wrote: post #75

What the article describes is called an "expert system" and is what AI in the enterprise used to look like. Basically, you try to capture the instinct of a great salesmen by formalizing it into computer logic. Often that's done with rules like in the article. It works good, but has its limits. The finer reasoning of human judgement are often not expressable, people don't know why they made that decision. Making it ha…

Newbie question: would you not design ML systems to be able to explain themselves? Alike: hey, query planner, what's your query plan?

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#122

Post by ImSkeptical »

gnicholas wrote: post #57
db1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to your website, and I can't figure out what your product is or does. I had to click in to individuals before I figured out what it does. Why not put "BeeLine Reader makes reading on-screen easier, faster, and more enjoyable. We use a simple cognitive trick — an eye-guiding color gradient — to pull your eyes from one line to the next." on your front page? Maybe you guys have already done some kind of testing a…

Appreciate the feedback. We recently redesigned the website to offer silos, and one of the goals was to make the landing page not offer too many specifics that would make some audiences bounce. But perhaps your suggestion is just what we need to do. Thanks for taking the time to share! One lesson learned: I should have linked to the /individual page instead of the generic landing page in my comment. Updating link now…

Adding on with a much more minor nit, I notice there seems to be a missing word in some of the explanatory text on the individual page.

"flip through a few above color schemes and see how much faster you can read"

"A few above" should probably be "a few of the above".

For what it's worth I had to take your reading challenge and flip through the schemes many times before noticing they did anything. I'm not sure if I'm color blind or what, but I hard time telling anything was different.

One final point, can I suggest using more compelling literature for your samples? I'm not sure who the intended person is for the reading test, but I think you should put in a couple that aren't aimed at teenagers. I'd suggest something from David Foster Wallace - he has some amazing short stories and articles. You might as well use captivating literature in addition to your color technique!

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#123

Post by reacharavindh »

halflings wrote: post #119

This could've been a valid criticism of people that use ML where it's not appropriate, but it ended up being a bit of an irrational rant, and a dishonest one too: > I mean, why send a letter with breast pumps to a man that just bought a pair of sneakers? It doesn't even make sense. Typical open rate for most marketing emails is anywhere between 7 - 10%. But when we do our work well, we saw close to 25 - 30%. How do y…

But, that might be in the realm of SQL too. Find out what items were frequently bought with the item that this customer bought, and send them as recommendations.. Rule-based does not always mean that a user is sitting down writing that tennis balls and tennis shoes are related items. Don't you think?

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#124

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

nl wrote: post #100
gnicholas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they wanted us to do something with NLP and ML, to make it syntactically-based. I happen to have studied linguistics and know how complex this would be — and of course it would have to be custom-built for every language. The current version, which just uses line position, works fine and is language-independent. Another explanation: they didn't actually know how they wanted us to us ML — they just knew they wa…

I do ML/NLP, and recently have been doing color related things. I think you are underestimating how useful NLP could be in your application. I tried out one of your test cases, and I did find it useful. However, I think that blending colors based on entity recognition along with your line based system could focus attention on important parts. Have a look at [1] (sorry for the long URL) and imagine the colors blending…

That sounds like a surefire way to annoy and distract the reader. Imagine if every entity was in bold, in a piece of text. It wouldn't draw your attention to important information, it would just disorient you completely. "Why is 'John' in bold? I already know this sentence is about him!".

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#125

Post by visarga »

reacharavindh wrote: post #123
halflings wrote: post #119

This could've been a valid criticism of people that use ML where it's not appropriate, but it ended up being a bit of an irrational rant, and a dishonest one too: > I mean, why send a letter with breast pumps to a man that just bought a pair of sneakers? It doesn't even make sense. Typical open rate for most marketing emails is anywhere between 7 - 10%. But when we do our work well, we saw close to 25 - 30%. How do y…

But, that might be in the realm of SQL too. Find out what items were frequently bought with the item that this customer bought, and send them as recommendations.. Rule-based does not always mean that a user is sitting down writing that tennis balls and tennis shoes are related items. Don't you think?

Expert systems are brittle and don't generalise well outside the data on which were created.

You know, counting items and dividing by total number is a kind of machine learned model, too. In technical terms it is "Computing the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) for the PMF of a random variable taking finitely many values."

But it's a poor man's model. That's why in order to solve complex problems we use stuff like neural nets and gradient boosting, and in unsupervised learning, matrix factorisation.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#126

Post by jmpeax »

> select from orders table where basket size is the biggest. We will then email a nice thank you note to this customer and attach a small coupon/voucher.... ...Guess what? 99% of these people became repeat customers

Sounds like you definitely need some ML there, in the form of statistics. Was there a difference in probability of repeat customers between sending and not sending the voucher? Was there a difference between basket sizes and probability of repeat customers? Is there an interaction between the two?

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#127

Post by asfdsfggtfd »

gnicholas wrote: post #114
fny wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great product idea! I'm glad people find it useful. Hypotheses: > corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment They want to put money in your company to make sure they don't have to compete with you or compete with someone else who might buy you down the line. > They kept prodding around on the ML stuff, and how we might be able to use ML to accomplish roughly the same thing. They're looking for secret sau…

Appreciate the feedback! Regarding analytics, I think this is some A/B testing, which I don't think is even active in the current version (though still in the sources). More importantly, we don't tie GA or any other usage analytics to individual users. We basically just use it to see where the extension is used and where people are blacklisting sites. We use this data to make the extension run better on more sites. W…

> we don't tie GA or any other usage analytics to individual users

You may not identify individual users but Google probably do...

> we should put this somewhere more prominent

You should make it opt in by default. Or stop doing it!

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#128

Post by halflings »

sverhagen wrote: post #121
didibus wrote: post #75

What the article describes is called an "expert system" and is what AI in the enterprise used to look like. Basically, you try to capture the instinct of a great salesmen by formalizing it into computer logic. Often that's done with rules like in the article. It works good, but has its limits. The finer reasoning of human judgement are often not expressable, people don't know why they made that decision. Making it ha…

Newbie question: would you not design ML systems to be able to explain themselves? Alike: hey, query planner, what's your query plan?

There is something close to what you're describing:

1) You train a complex ML model (say, deep neural net) to get the job done, solve your problem with high accuracy.

2) When you want to explain one of your model's results, you train a simpler more explainable model (say, linear regression) in the neighborhood of that point, such that it is locally similar to the more complex model. The task is too complex to be explained by a linear regression model over all possible inputs, but it often is simple enough around a specific point.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#129

Post by gaius »

halflings wrote: post #116
guy98238710 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need AI to find values for free parameters. Unless you consider all of statistics to be a subfield of AI.

Why use the term "AI" when the GP specifically used the less ambiguous Machine Learning? Machine Learning = statistics + linear algebra + computer science, mostly. Naive Bayes and Graphical Models are pure statistics, but they are mostly used for toy problems. Machine Learning scales these approaches to high dimensionality problems, and tasks where data is abundant.

If someone had something as basic as logistic regression or k-means clustering in a production app they are already ahead of the vast majority of ML practitioners

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#130

Post by gnicholas »

asfdsfggtfd wrote: post #127
gnicholas wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the feedback! Regarding analytics, I think this is some A/B testing, which I don't think is even active in the current version (though still in the sources). More importantly, we don't tie GA or any other usage analytics to individual users. We basically just use it to see where the extension is used and where people are blacklisting sites. We use this data to make the extension run better on more sites. W…

> we don't tie GA or any other usage analytics to individual users You may not identify individual users but Google probably do... > we should put this somewhere more prominent You should make it opt in by default. Or stop doing it!

We're totally open to making this opt-in. I'm curious how we should gather usage data, which some of our nonprofit funders require us to report for their impact questionnaire. How can we know how much the tools are being used if it's opt-in? Or are there other systems (other than Google) that raise fewer concerns?

I really appreciate all the candid advice in this thread and hope that we — and others in similar situations — can use it to improve our products.

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