

Ask HN: what are simple problems where Machine Learning can help? - toisanji

I've been doing a lot of machine learning lately, applying models to do classification and regression. I'm trying to find simple problems that people have where machine learning could help. I would love to have a discussion about it.
======
sharemywin
-Facial, Finger print,iris Recognition -detect pulse from images possibly other vitals -game AI -Sales forcasting -recommendation engines -underwriting -summarization article -image, video, text classification

------
cmaxwe
I tried to use NHL box scores to predict NHL outcomes. Seemed like a pretty
good opportunity to use machine learning. Ended up only being able to predict
at like 54% or something like that which isn't even enough to break even.

What I did find though was that if I looked for games where my estimated
accuracy rate was high and the odds were good then I probably could have bet
on those games for a profit but they were very rare.

------
knowledgesale
Here are class projects for Machine Learning at Stanford:
<http://cs229.stanford.edu/projects2012.html>

Should be a good start.

------
VorticonCmdr
spell correction is somewhat of the most popular and easy to understand
problems where machine learning can help. For example: several user enter a
misspelled word and then correct them in the next step. If this happens often
enough you might infer that the second word is most probably the correct
version, especially if the second word has a small levenshtein -distance to
the first.

------
toisanji
To clarify, I was thinking more along the lines of startup ideas.

~~~
tptacek
Isn't that a little like asking about simple problems that graph theory or
compiler theory could solve as the basis of a startup?

~~~
toisanji
True, but sometimes you do come across some interesting ideas.

