The Three Cultures of Machine Learning

by Jason Eisner (2015)

Everyone should read Leo Breiman's 2001 article, Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures. (Summary: Traditional statisticians start with a distribution. They try to identify the parameters of the distribution from data that were actually generated from it. Applied statisticians start with data. They have no idea where their data really came from and are happy to fit any model that makes good predictions.)

I think there are currently three cultures of machine learning. Different people or projects will fall in different places on this "ML simplex" depending on what they care about most. They start with something in green and attempt to get blue as a way of achieving red.

The simplex is not intended as a categorization of machine learning methods themselves. Rather, the 3 corners represent the 3 concerns that come into play when you try to choose a method: insightful modeling, model capacity, formal guarantees. Sometimes multiple concerns can be satisfied by the same method. But when they're in tension, which one do you worry about most, and which one would you soonest sacrifice? That places you on the simplex.

In practice, finding an ML attack on an applied problem usually involves combining elements of multiple traditions. It also involves using various computational tricks (MCMC, variational approximations, convex relaxations, optimization algorithms, etc.) to try to handle the maximizations and integrations that are needed for learning and inference.

(I suppose the drawing is mostly about prediction. It omits reinforcement learning and causal learning. But such problems involve prediction, so the same competing priorities guide how practitioners approach problems.)


Update: Mark Tygert alerted me that Efron (1998) gave a similar simplex diagram -- Fig. 8, "A barycentric picture of modern statistical research" -- whose corners were the Bayesian, frequentist and Fisherian philosophies.


This page online: http://cs.jhu.edu/~jason/tutorials/ml-simplex
Jason Eisner - jason@cs.jhu.edu (suggestions welcome) Last Mod $Date: 2016/02/03 06:33:40 $