
Model-Based Machine Learning - seycombi
http://mbmlbook.com/toc.html
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oergiR
The "model" in the title is the model of the world, as a probabilistic model.
The good thing about such a model is that it explicitly states your beliefs
about the world. Once you've defined it, in theory reasoning about it is
straightforward. (In practice a lot of papers get written about how to do
approximate inference.) It's also straightforward to do unsupervised learning.

This is a different perspective from (most uses of) neural networks, which do
not have this clear separation between the model and how to reason about it.
It's funny that Chris Bishop in 1995 wrote the textbook "Neural Networks for
Pattern Recognition" and now is effectively arguing against using neural
networks.

You can use both by using neural networks as "factors" (the black squares) in
probabilistic models.

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highd
One of the most popular ways of using techniques like this is the "Variational
Autoencoder". I've been working on using some alternate distributions with
them as of late - it's very interesting, and quite powerful.

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nl
How does this work? You use the VAE to model variables and then somehow get
the distribution from them?

Got a link? (I know the basics of VAEs, but I'm missing how to link them to
this)

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highd
The VAE "coder" is modelling a distribution p(z|x), and the decoder is
modelling a distribution p(x|z).

I like these slides:
[https://home.zhaw.ch/~dueo/bbs/files/vae.pdf](https://home.zhaw.ch/~dueo/bbs/files/vae.pdf)

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ThePhysicist
I have to say the layout of this website looks great! Very accessible and
clean. Was it made with a specific framework?

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jamessb
One of the css files [0] includes a copyright notice for Skeleton ("A dead
simple, responsive boilerplate"). [1].

[0]:
[http://mbmlbook.com/HtmlReader.styles.base.css](http://mbmlbook.com/HtmlReader.styles.base.css)

[1]: [http://getskeleton.com/](http://getskeleton.com/)

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danappelxx
Hmm, not very responsive for me (iPhone 6 safari iOS 10)

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nkozyra
I've never heard supervised learning referred to as model-based learning.

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rm999
The introduction clarifies what the authors mean. In this context "model"
isn't about implementing a supervised model, it's about "modeling" your
problem to build a bespoke algorithm that closely matches the problem.
Unsupervised methods like clustering would probably fit in here too.

I haven't read much of this early access book yet, but I'd give the authors a
lot of benefit of the doubt. Christopher Bishop wrote one of my favorite
machine learning books (I read it after my graduate study in machine learning
and it filled in a lott of the gaps): [https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-
Recognition-Learning-Informat...](https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-
Learning-Information-Statistics/dp/0387310738)

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brudgers
From the Hacker News guidelines:

 _Please don 't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even
read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions
that."_

It is possible to edit the comment to remove the phrase if you wish.

~~~
rm999
It was an honest question, not snark (passive aggressiveness is not my style).

The introduction is kind of hidden on the page, and clarifies the meaning of
"model" in this context. Otherwise, GP is correct that "model" is often used
to mean a supervised model, and that people generally call it "supervised
learning", not "model-based learning".

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brudgers
I'm glad it was an honest question. Editing the comment is an option.

I think the guideline exists because even as an honest question it does not
add anything to the comment and at best an answer doesn't change anything and
at worst it detracts from meaningful dialog.

One feature of this particular guideline is that it provides an alternative
phrasing that is likely to avoid misinterpretation.

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rm999
>I think the guideline exists because even as an honest question it does not
add anything to the comment

I hope you see the irony here considering how much you're derailing this
conversation (I'm only responding because I realize your intentions are good).
And I'm pretty confident my comment added plenty of value to the discussion -
I realize sometimes tone is lost in text, but after my clarification I don't
see why you need to harp on this. Anyway, original comment edited.

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brudgers
If I had thought of suggesting editing your comment before posting my second
comment, then it might have been different. And in a similar situation in the
future I well might. That said, until I thought about it a bit more, it didn't
occur to me. Anyway, for me, writing is thinking.

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geooooooooobox
Anybody know if Scala's Figaro software is in the same category as Church?

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nextos
Yes, it is equivalent.

