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Transform Data by Example [video]

microsoft.com

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Re: Transform Data by Example [video]

#21

Post by jdironman »

paulddraper wrote: post #19
unfamiliar wrote: post #10

Humans are really good at taking a vague description of a task and using a small number of examples to disambiguate it. For example, "sort all of the folders, so that it Alan goes before Amy, etc". The rule ("sort") is pretty ambiguous, but one simple example in the context gives enough information to realise you probably mean alphabetically by first name. Is there something like this example that could be combined w…

> Humans are really good at taking a vague description of a task and using a small number of examples to disambiguate it. IIRC this is tested heavily in IQ tests.

Abstract thought really.

Re: Transform Data by Example [video]

#22

Post by jnpatel »

function_seven wrote: post #11
teddyh wrote: post #5

You know what this reminds me of? Those trained neural-net things which, however many training examples you give it, always seem to find some way to “cheat” and not do what you want while still obeying all your training data correctly. Something like this: Suppose we have a table of strings of digits, some including spaces, and we’d like to remove the spaces. From 123 456 234567 345 678 to 123456 234567 345678 Now, w…

This is why I want any ML device to be able to explain itself. It could train on your before-and-after examples and come up with a list of what it thinks you want it to do. For your example, it could list: “Remove interior spaces from each item” or it could say: “Remove the middle character from any 7-character strings to make them 6 characters in length” You would be able to do something with that.

DataWrangler [0] (now productionized as Trifacta Wrangler [1]) does pretty much that. It gives you suggested lists of transformations such as "Cut from position 18-25 as the Year column", that you can chain together as your data cleaning pipeline.

[0]: http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/

[1]: https://www.trifacta.com/products/wrangler/

Re: Transform Data by Example [video]

#23

Post by Spiritus »

unfamiliar wrote: post #10

Humans are really good at taking a vague description of a task and using a small number of examples to disambiguate it. For example, "sort all of the folders, so that it Alan goes before Amy, etc". The rule ("sort") is pretty ambiguous, but one simple example in the context gives enough information to realise you probably mean alphabetically by first name. Is there something like this example that could be combined w…

Isn't just because we've already been trained on that since learning the alphabet? Imagine giving a human the same question, but sort "aa" before "bb" but after "cc".

Re: Transform Data by Example [video]

#25

Post by allenz »

paulddraper wrote: post #16
function_seven wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I want any ML device to be able to explain itself. It could train on your before-and-after examples and come up with a list of what it thinks you want it to do. For your example, it could list: “Remove interior spaces from each item” or it could say: “Remove the middle character from any 7-character strings to make them 6 characters in length” You would be able to do something with that.

Neural nets are infamous for not doing this. Learning algorithms that produce decision trees are usually used in this situation.

It's theoretically possible for a neural net to do this; the network just needs to have the explanation as an output. I agree that decision trees would be more reliable and easier to train, but I'm not sure if hardcoding every feature is scalable.

Re: Transform Data by Example [video]

#26

Post by nebabyte »

paulddraper wrote: post #16
function_seven wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I want any ML device to be able to explain itself. It could train on your before-and-after examples and come up with a list of what it thinks you want it to do. For your example, it could list: “Remove interior spaces from each item” or it could say: “Remove the middle character from any 7-character strings to make them 6 characters in length” You would be able to do something with that.

Neural nets are infamous for not doing this. Learning algorithms that produce decision trees are usually used in this situation.

Which is why learning algorithms that produce decision trees are far smarter in the long run. Neural nets might eke out other benefits but there's a lot to be said about justifiable/accountable decisions.

Re: Transform Data by Example [video]

#28

Post by function_seven »

allenz wrote: post #25
paulddraper wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neural nets are infamous for not doing this. Learning algorithms that produce decision trees are usually used in this situation.

It's theoretically possible for a neural net to do this; the network just needs to have the explanation as an output. I agree that decision trees would be more reliable and easier to train, but I'm not sure if hardcoding every feature is scalable.

How do you know that the explanation jives with the other outputs, though? It seems like a turtles-all-the-way-down situation, because now I want to see how it was properly introspective of its own decision making.

Also seems like it’s another magnitude of complexity in the neural net to have it not only train and learn on your inputs, but also train and learn on its own training and learning.

Re: Transform Data by Example [video]

#29

Post by function_seven »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #14
function_seven wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I want any ML device to be able to explain itself. It could train on your before-and-after examples and come up with a list of what it thinks you want it to do. For your example, it could list: “Remove interior spaces from each item” or it could say: “Remove the middle character from any 7-character strings to make them 6 characters in length” You would be able to do something with that.

IIRC you _can_ get this, but it's a huge algorithm that doesn't do things in a way that would probably make sense to a human. It would be amazing to be able to transform code into human language.

I was sloppy in my own examples. I’d be perfectly satisfied with an AST, or regex, or other non-English explanation. But something that I can audit is what I’m after. Otherwise this tool would never be trustworthy enough to let lose on billions of rows of data, with silent errors occurring throughout. (Well, I guess it depends on the nature and importance of the data. Cat photos, meh. Drug prescriptions? Ahh!)

Re: Transform Data by Example [video]

#30

Post by taeric »

bcherny wrote: post #27

Wait, Excel had this built in since 2013! https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-AutoFill-and-Fl...

I recall a joke from someone... Can't remember who, that went like, "does your startup compete with Excel? Did you just rediscover pivot tables?"
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