8 ms·

I agree. I don't think this isn't any more revealing. Just a different way of visualizing. And there is also the drawback of a whole new interpretation when you

by aecs99 9y ago

I agree. I don't think this isn't any more revealing. Just a different way of visualizing. And there is also the drawback of a whole new interpretation when you re-map your input features to Chernoff facial features.

classichasclass 9y ago
That's what I'm struggling with. Take the example on the Wikipedia page: I don't know what the faces mean for each judge. Is the judge a jerk? Does the judge take too long with their arraignments? Is this a value, er, judgment on the legal sufficiency of their determinations? If the primary utility is to be able to quickly visually discriminate values once you know how they're encoded into facial features, then I can see the value, but again you'd have to know the encoding. Or have I missed the point completely?
- aecs99 9y ago
  Yes, the primary utility is to understand how discriminative your features are. There is no meaning of what each face represents. Checkout the Chernoff Fish demo posted below by the user meagher here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16664051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16664051. Play with different features, say for example, 'performance'. When you change the value of 'performance', the eye size changes. However, the eye size doesn't mean anything except for you to visually understand variations in data. If 'performance' was mapped to, say, fin size, it doesn't change its meaning.
  - classichasclass 9y ago
    Thanks, I think I understand its utility a bit better now.
  - davidgu 9y ago
    I wonder how this affects pattern recognition. Would people more readily recognize that say, "Large Spiky Orange Fish" strategies lead to greater returns, compared to if the strategies were presented as "Short | Value Investment | Large Market Capitalization"? This could also be an interesting way of eliminating inherent bias while leveraging human pattern recognition abilities. Represent values pictorially, and hide data labels.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  It's not meant for professional data analysis use. It's a gimmick for kids or for printing in a magazine article.

by aecs99 9y ago

classichasclass 9y ago

That's what I'm struggling with. Take the example on the Wikipedia page: I don't know what the faces mean for each judge. Is the judge a jerk? Does the judge take too long with their arraignments? Is this a value, er, judgment on the legal sufficiency of their determinations? If the primary utility is to be able to quickly visually discriminate values once you know how they're encoded into facial features, then I can see the value, but again you'd have to know the encoding. Or have I missed the point completely?

aecs99 9y ago
Yes, the primary utility is to understand how discriminative your features are. There is no meaning of what each face represents. Checkout the Chernoff Fish demo posted below by the user meagher here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16664051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16664051. Play with different features, say for example, 'performance'. When you change the value of 'performance', the eye size changes. However, the eye size doesn't mean anything except for you to visually understand variations in data. If 'performance' was mapped to, say, fin size, it doesn't change its meaning.
- classichasclass 9y ago
  Thanks, I think I understand its utility a bit better now.
- davidgu 9y ago
  I wonder how this affects pattern recognition. Would people more readily recognize that say, "Large Spiky Orange Fish" strategies lead to greater returns, compared to if the strategies were presented as "Short | Value Investment | Large Market Capitalization"? This could also be an interesting way of eliminating inherent bias while leveraging human pattern recognition abilities. Represent values pictorially, and hide data labels.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
It's not meant for professional data analysis use. It's a gimmick for kids or for printing in a magazine article.