Re:Tips for Shipping Data Products Fast
by lumost on Thursday March 04, 2021 @02:06PM
(#26346686)
I think the problems you mention start off a bit of a rabbit hole trap which most ML teams fall into.
Effectively, many problems do not have formal "correct" solutions which can easily be applied. One can spend an unbounded amount of time maintaining data-integrity or improving uncertainty handling. As you add more people familiar with this depth to the team, the "best/correct approach" becomes harder to achieve. In the end, a naive estimate of uncertainty is likely about as valuable to the customer as a formal estimate in most problem domains.
"Avoid ML" can easily be code for avoid ambiguous research oriented tasks while building an industrial project, or alternately "don't trust that a magic algorithm will solve your customer problem".
Effectively, many problems do not have formal "correct" solutions which can easily be applied. One can spend an unbounded amount of time maintaining data-integrity or improving uncertainty handling. As you add more people familiar with this depth to the team, the "best/correct approach" becomes harder to achieve. In the end, a naive estimate of uncertainty is likely about as valuable to the customer as a formal estimate in most problem domains.
"Avoid ML" can easily be code for avoid ambiguous research oriented tasks while building an industrial project, or alternately "don't trust that a magic algorithm will solve your customer problem".