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Is k-means really what people are doing in serious production machine-learning settings? Yes, that is one option. Ask me over Christmas and I'll tell you a st

by patio11 13y ago

Is k-means really what people are doing in serious production machine-learning settings? Yes, that is one option. Ask me over Christmas and I'll tell you a story about a production system using k-means. (Sorry guys, not a story for public consumption.) More broadly, a lot of machine learning / AI / etc is simpler than people expect under the hood. It's almost a joke in the AI field: as soon as you produce a system that actually works, people say "Oh that's not AI, that's just math."

glimcat 13y ago
Most of the classifiers I've seen used in industry aren't even k-means. They're fixed heuristics (often with plausibly effective decision boundaries found via k-means). Consider the Netflix Prize, where the most effective algorithm couldn't actually be used in production. Commercial applications tend to favor "good enough" classification with low computational complexity. > It's almost a joke in the AI field: as soon as you produce a system that actually works, people say "Oh that's not AI, that's just math." I think that's the standard "insert joke here" any time someone has a "What is AI?" slide.