3 ms·
I can totally appreciate the value of having well defined and well understood definitions and notations that might require lots of background to understand. Th
by robrenaud 13y ago
I can totally appreciate the value of having well defined and well understood definitions and notations that might require lots of background to understand. This allows for precise and concise discourse.
But there have been many published bounds in Machine Learning Theory that turned out to be completely vacuous. That is, they prove a bound on generalization error that is always greater than 1.
http://hunch.net/?p=181 http://hunch.net/?p=181
To me, that definitely seems like complicated math for the sake of showing off and writing papers rather than writing for clarity and demonstrating something useful.
- nico 13y agoI think some people just have a better grasp of the technical language that is commonly used for describing most of this stuff. The language definitely helps the people most closely involved, but it also leaves a lot of people out. Being an abstraction, the language helps in developing the field further just by allowing to find new abstractions on top of the already existing ones. Very similar to what happens with programming languages in general.
- kskz 13y agoNot really. This is more of an example of a "failed experiment" than showing off. Research is hard. You never know if what you're doing will be useful, or just plain wrong.
- zodiac 13y agoIt would be math for the sake of showing off only if the authors or referees knew before publishing that the bounds were vacuous. In fact, most mathematicians would probably be embarrassed if that happened to one of their results, and it's nothing to show off about.