Machine Learning (ML) Feature Space Design Task

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A Machine Learning (ML) Feature Space Design Task is a data structure design task that designs ML features for a ML model design task.



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  • (Domingos, 2012) ⇒ Pedro Domingos. (2012). “A Few Useful Things to Know About Machine Learning.” In: Communications of the ACM Journal, 55(10). doi:10.1145/2347736.2347755
    • QUOTE: … Easily the most important factor is the features used. Learning is easy if you have many independent features that each correlate well with the class. On the other hand, if the class is a very complex function of the features, you may not be able to learn it. Often, the raw data is not in a form that is amenable to learning, but you can construct features from it that are. This is typically where most of the effort in a machine learning project goes. It is often also one of the most interesting parts, where intuition, creativity and "black art" are as important as the technical stuff.

      First-timers are often surprised by how little time in a machine learning project is spent actually doing machine learning. But it makes sense if you consider how time-consuming it is to gather data, integrate it, clean it and preprocess it, and how much trial and error can go into feature design. Also, machine learning is not a one-shot process of building a dataset and running a learner, but rather an iterative process of running the learner, analyzing the results, modifying the data and/or the learner, and repeating. Learning is often the quickest part of this, but that is because we have already mastered it pretty well! Feature engineering is more difficult because it is domain-specific, while learners can be largely general purpose. However, there is no sharp frontier between the two, and this is another reason the most useful learners are those that facilitate incorporating knowledge.

      Of course, one of the holy grails of machine learning is to automate more and more of the feature engineering process. One way this is often done today is by automatically generating large numbers of candidate features and selecting the best by (say) their information gain with respect to the class. But bear in mind that features that look irrelevant in isolation may be relevant in combination. For example, if the class is an XOR of k input features, each of them by itself carries no information about the class. (If you want to annoy machine learners, bring up XOR.) On the other hand, running a learner with a very large number of features to find out which ones are useful in combination may be too time-consuming, or cause overfitting. So there is ultimately no replacement for the smarts you put into feature engineering.

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