Understanding Latent Style
multithreaded.stitchfix.com
Understanding Latent Style
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Understanding Latent Style
#2Do these writers expect anybody but themselves to understand this post?
Re: Understanding Latent Style
#3This is a great article, and it reveals some interesting new ideas to test out. However, I wish they included examples that qualitatively demonstrate how effective each improvement was. Some of us don’t have a team of almost 100 high-end data scientists like they do. Since I only have a couple of people, I need to always be careful to focus on techniques with ROI (low implementation cost, (relatively) high effectiveness). Machine learning can be labor intensive.
Re: Understanding Latent Style
#4Engineering is clearly reaching a point where it is and will be much more integrated and coupled with pure and applied mathematics. I think it's more than time to start taking this implicit project seriously by making it explicit. We aught to think back to the foundations of the way we think about programming in the first place, and we should try to build a new mindset which takes the best parts of the hacker spirit and the pure mathematics mindset and create something new, something more fitting to the enviourment we've found ourselves in, where essentially the only limits to what we can produce is our ability to imagine them.
Re: Understanding Latent Style
#5Do these writers expect anybody but themselves to understand this post?
I think it's a recruiting tool, so they are okay if only the jargon is indecipherable by most readers. In fact, it's probably signalling to their targets that they are serious about machine learning.
Re: Understanding Latent Style
#6It will be interesting to watch as they improve this process. I use Stitch Fix, and I don't feel like it's all that personalized. The problem is that as a consumer you don't see all the products they could have selected for you. Maybe there's three options for male jeans, maybe there's fifty, it's opaque to the user. The result is a little disappointing because as an American consumer my options are nearly unlimited (only my time is constrained).
Re: Understanding Latent Style
#7I don't get it. They seem to have blogs. Do they sell anything?
Re: Understanding Latent Style
#8Hmm.
So I have mixed feelings about this. I think it is good that StichFix is publishing how they work, and I have complete admiration for what they have achieved.
I still use their post about the ability to add a "pregnant" vector to an item of clothing and find a similar item in a maternity version to explain how objects can be embedded in a vector space.
But this post seems both too complicated for the general reader, and not deep enough for a paper.
Re: Understanding Latent Style
#9Do these writers expect anybody but themselves to understand this post?
I found it enjoyable and understandable, but I guess I was already slightly familiar with matrix factorization for recommendation/characterization problems.
Re: Understanding Latent Style
#10Do these writers expect anybody but themselves to understand this post?
I think the audience is more the quantitative "data science"/ machine learning crowd.
The nice friendly web design makes this look deceptively simple (and it is if you have the right background), but this type of material is not aimed at a general audience.
At the same time, as noted by another commenter, this isn't arXiv material either.
It's somewhere in between.