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The whole point isn't to do better. It's to show that enough information survives compression that you can still get very large signal. Compression is intended
by TimPC 3y ago
The whole point isn't to do better. It's to show that enough information survives compression that you can still get very large signal. Compression is intended to make things harder and still does.
- amelius 3y agoWhy? I mean it's trivial to add a layer of encryption ... (Also the terminology seems off here, as 100% of information survives gzip.)
- GaggiX 3y agoThe article OP linked is inspired by Gzip+Knn paper that was released a few months ago, compression is not intended to make things harder but to extract useful features that can be used by simple algorithms like Knn or SVG etc... For example it would be almost impossible to distinguish cat and dog images by using SVG or Knn directly on the data but it would be much easier if the images were first passed into an image encoder and a small embeddings vector would be used for each one instead. In the article OP linked it doesn't seem that Gzip is very good at extracting useful patterns for the MNIST dataset.
- minitech 3y agoNo, that wasn’t the point at all. Compressibility was used to determine similarity.
- vintermann 3y agoAnd what it accidentally showed, was that NCD between individual digits in the training set is a really terrible distance metric for classification. You can do classification with KNN, which is obvious. You can also do classification with compression, which is less obvious, and neat. This approach tries to combine them in a way which doesn't work.