Re:The Twitter Algorithm
by minimaxir on Friday March 31, 2023 @04:44PM
(#35393372)
True, it still seems odd to encode an explicitly ordinal variable as categorical (particularly one with a small finite range, in contrast to the follower logarithmic bucket ones), but Twitter's layout is weird enough that it could be a impactful difference in terms of engagement.
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Re:The Twitter Algorithm
by disgruntledphd2 on Friday March 31, 2023 @05:13PM
(#35393745)
This is (weirdly) common in production ML codebases written by software engineers. Like you, I have no idea why unless it's a memory optimisation (where you count 4+ as many).
Having every column as a boolean (0/1) means you can treat it as a bitmap. As an (entirely fictional) example, imagine if you wanted to get the features of a thread instead of a single tweet. You could do it as a union of all the tweets:
threadFeatures = tweet1 | tweet2 | tweet2
Re:The Twitter Algorithm
by disgruntledphd2 on Friday March 31, 2023 @05:52PM
(#35394158)
Ok that makes lots of sense from an engineering perspective. It's pretty insane from a statistical perspective though, which I think was the original point.
> It's pretty insane from a statistical perspective though
Efficiency is way more of a concern, at this scale, than the more trivial was of trying to find a competent person that wouldn't misuse the values.