Thursday, July 26, 2018

On machine learning speculations

In this paper, we focus on the following four patterns that appear to us to be trending in ML scholarship:


Failure to distinguish between explanation and speculation.
Failure to identify the sources of empirical gains, e.g. emphasizing unnecessary modifications to neural architectures when gains actually stem from hyper-parameter tuning.
Mathiness: the use of mathematics that obfuscates or impresses rather than clarifies, e.g. by confusing technical and non-technical concepts.
Misuse of language, e.g. by choosing terms of art with colloquial connotations or by overloading established technical terms.

from here