Re:Machine Learning for Hackers
by dagw on Wednesday February 08, 2012 @07:50AM
(#3566330)
Simple machine learning isn't particularly magical and many of the simpler techniques are pretty trivial and can give perfectly usable results without needing much of a thorough theoretical background. Sure you can get better results faster if you dig into the details and really learn and understand what you are doing, but many real world problems don't really require that. No need to wrap up simple usable algorithms and shrouds of high-brow mysticism.
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I agree you often don't need to know some of the guts of the algorithms, but what they're doing and how to interpret their results is important imo. There is a lot of misuse of statistics, or at least sloppy use of statistics, in the "applied data mining" field. In particular, when interpreting the results you usually need to be careful with paying attention to what assumptions went into generating them, or else it's easy to make stronger claims than the data really warrants.
And here I totally agree. I guess the message that needs to be made clear is that doing machine learning is really quite easy and really nothing special, doing something meaningful with the numbers that come out from your program is the hard part that should be focused on.