Re:A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
by reader5000 on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @03:30PM
(#14851109)
You're right, but a) you have comp efficiency issues with MCMC, and b) just empirically MCMC models don't work as well as gradient descent + NN for many tasks.
Re:A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
by achompas on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @04:37PM
(#14851644)
And you don't have computational efficiency issues with NNs?
We're also ignoring the benefits of a posterior distribution, which is useful for understanding the data-generating process.
Re:A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
by reader5000 on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @06:42PM
(#14852497)
Yeah of course. I can't explain to you why NNs outperform bayesian approaches, probably just NNs are capturing the correct type of prior for vision/language tasks. And yeah bayesian models are more interpretable but when you have millions of latent variables I'm not sure interpretability is a thing.
Re:A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
by achompas on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @11:43PM
(#14853532)
Yep, we arrived at my larger point: if you care about interpretability, NNs are horrible and Bayesian techniques are pretty damn great.
Re:A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
by reader5000 on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @01:13PM
(#14858093)
Well certainly, but interpretability is obsolete.
So we instead sample from that posterior.
Unless you think MCMC is also obsolete, in which case I’ll see myself out.