When we talk about deep neural networks, we tend to focus on feature learning. Traditionally, in the field of machine learning, people use hand-crafted features. What this means is that we look at the data and build a feature vector which we think would be good and discriminative. Once we have that, we train a model to learn from it. But one of the biggest problems with this approach is that we don’t really know if it’s the best possible representation of the data. Ideally, we would want the machine to learn the features by itself, and then use it to build the machine learning model. Autoencoder is one such neural network which aims to learn how to build optimal feature vector for the given data. So how exactly does it work? How is it used in practice? Continue reading “Autoencoders In Machine Learning”
Tag: Pattern Recognition
What’s The Importance Of Hyperparameters In Machine Learning?
Machine learning is becoming increasingly relevant in all walks of science and technology. In fact, it’s an integral part of many fields like computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, e-commerce, spam filtering, and so on. The list is potential applications is pretty huge! People working on machine learning tend to build models based on training data, in the hope that those models will perform well on unseen data. As we all know, every model has some parameters associated with it. We want our machine learning models to estimate these parameters from the training data. But as it turns out, there are a few parameters that cannot be estimated using this procedure. These parameters tend have a significant impact on the performance of your model. Now why is that? Where do these parameters come from? How do we deal with this? Continue reading “What’s The Importance Of Hyperparameters In Machine Learning?”
What Is A Markov Chain?
If you have studied probability theory, then you must have heard Markov’s name. When we study probability and statistics, we tend to deal with independent trials. What this means is that if you conduct an experiment a lot of times, we assume that the outcome of one trial doesn’t influence the outcome of the next trial. For example, let’s say you are tossing a coin. If you toss the coin 5 times, you are bound to get either heads or tails with equal probability. If the outcome of the first toss is heads, it doesn’t tell us anything about the next trial. But what if we are dealing with a situation where this assumption is not true? If we are dealing with something like estimating the weather, we cannot assume that today’s weather is not affected by what happened yesterday. If we go ahead with the independence assumption here, we are bound to get wrong results. How do we formulate this kind of model? Continue reading “What Is A Markov Chain?”
What Is Manifold Learning?
Machine learning is being used extensively in fields like computer vision, natural language processing, and data mining. In many modern applications that are being built, we usually derive a classifier or a model from an extremely large data set. The accuracy of the training algorithms is directly proportional to the amount of data we have. So most modern data sets often consist of a large number of examples, each of which is made up of many features. Having access to a lot of examples is very useful in extracting a good model from the data, but managing a large number of features is usually a burden to our algorithm. The thing is that some of these features may be irrelevant, so it’s important to make sure the final model doesn’t get affected by this. If the feature sets are complex, then our algorithm will be slowed down and it will be very difficult to find the global optimum. Given this situation, a good way to approach it would be to reduce the number of features we have. But if we do that in a careless manner, we might end up losing information. We want to reduce the number of features while retaining the maximum amount of information. Now what does it have to with manifold learning? Why do we care about reducing the dimensionality of our data? Continue reading “What Is Manifold Learning?”
Recognizing Shapes Using Point Distribution Models
In the field of computer vision, we often come across situations where we need to recognize the shapes of different objects. Not only that, we also need our machines to understand the shapes so that we can identify them even if we encounter them in different forms. Humans are really good at these things. We somehow make a mental note about these shapes and create a mapping in our brain. But if somebody asks you to write a formula or a function to identify it, we cannot come up with a precise set of rules. In fact, the whole field of computer vision is based on chasing this hold grail. In this blog post, we will discuss a particular model which is used to identify different shapes. Continue reading “Recognizing Shapes Using Point Distribution Models”
What Is Fuzzy Matching?
This is a continuation of the previous blog post on fuzzy search. We use fuzzy matching algorithms in fuzzy search to come up with the search results. The strength of a fuzzy search algorithm heavily depends on the strength of the fuzzy matching algorithm that is being used. The concept of matching refers to an input being matched to a set of entries, or records, in your database to come up with the best possible match. We encounter this scenario very frequently in our everyday lives. Whenever you are looking up a word in the dictionary or when somebody is looking up your account during a customer service call, some form of matching is being used to get the answers. So how exactly does fuzzy matching work? What’s the big deal here? Continue reading “What Is Fuzzy Matching?”
What Is Fuzzy Search?
The word “fuzzy” means something that is indistinct or vague, something that cannot be explained precisely. We all know what “search” means. That should give you a hint of what this blog post is about. Whenever you type something into the Google search engine, you will see that it always returns good results, even when you type the wrong spelling. How does it know what you meant? There are many different ways to misspell a word. How does it know exactly what word you have in mind? Continue reading “What Is Fuzzy Search?”
Gaussian Mixture Models
Let’s say you have a lot of data and you want to estimate the underlying statistical model. Wait a minute, why on earth would I care about that? Well, if you estimate the model, then you can analyze unknown data that is not under our control. Some of the common examples would be weather estimation, facial expressions analysis, speech recognition, share prices, etc. Coming back to the estimation problem, the simplest thing to do would be compute the mean and variance of this data, hence getting the governing distribution. But what if there are multiple subgroups in this data? As in, how do we detect the presence of subpopulations within an overall population? Even though the data points belong to the overall data, we need to understand the different modes inside the data. How do we go about doing this? Continue reading “Gaussian Mixture Models”
Overfitting In Machine Learning
Let’s say you are given a small set of data points. These data points can take any form like weight distribution of people, location of people who buy your products, types of smartphones, etc. Now your job is to estimate the underlying model. As in, if an unknown point comes in, you should to be able to fit it into your model. Typical supervised learning stuff! But the problem is that you have very few datapoints to begin with. So how do we accurately estimate that model? Should you really tighten your model to satisfy every single point you have? Continue reading “Overfitting In Machine Learning”
What Is K-Means Clustering?
Let’s say you get a whole bunch of data samples and you want to do some analysis about the underlying structure of those samples. You know that they can be categorized into certain groups, but you are not exactly sure what those categories are. For example, you get the data associated with shopping behavior of consumers. You want to understand what products are more popular, what kind of consumers buy these products, what time of the year do consumers buy more, etc. In order to divide this data into subgroups, we need to know what those groups should be in the first place. In our case, we don’t! This becomes increasingly difficult as you get more samples, often ranging in hundreds of thousands. So how do we analyze this data? How do we make the machine automatically learn the underlying structure and categorize accordingly? Continue reading “What Is K-Means Clustering?”
Perpetual Enigma 