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What fundamental understanding have statistical models produced?
by foobarqux 10y ago
What fundamental understanding have statistical models produced?
- mcguire 10y agoSee statistical mechanics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics [Edit] No really, take the ideal gas law. To get a real understanding of a given situation, you would have to know the position and momentum of all of the molecules of the gas. But the ideal gas law says, no, you don't need all of that to get a very good approximation; all you need to know to get the pressure of a gas is the temperature, volume, and amount of gas.
- foobarqux 10y agoObviously not the type of statistical model I was referring to.
- mcguire 10y agoObviously? Physics went through this same argument with thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Predictive, statistical models pretty much won. And then along came quantum mechanics---there's nothing descriptive there at all.
- foobarqux 10y agoWe were discussing machine learning not models which contain statistical properties. And both statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics are descriptive, what they are not is determinate.
- 3pt14159 10y agoHere is a personal anecdote that will hopefully make clear what I'm talking about. When I first used LDA I was blown away at how context could disarm homonyms. This type of insight isn't exactly mind blowing after the fact, but it's still compelling enough to expect that statistical models produce insights that are broadly applicable without having to resort to proving it.
- foldr 10y agoDidn't we already know that homonyms can be disambiguated based on context?