
Understanding Latent Style - lizthewhiz
https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2018/06/28/latent-style/
======
rockmeamedee
I liked this post a lot.

I liked that they are doing this with the simplest and most well-understood
techniques, matrix factorization+PCA.

Though I'm sure they're also trying end-to-end extra-deep programmatic multi-
media networks with new kinds of convolutional layers, fancy residual
connections, an experimental batchnorm variant, etc... I'd love to see if they
squeeze more juice out of that.

As we make more of these semantic meaning-spaces like word2vec, or the meaning
space of "photos of airbnb rooms", I think we could use some foundational UI
design work to navigate them better. Like, now you can navigate everything on
stitchfix through a small 50-d space where every component is nearly
orthogonal and can kind of be interpreted ahead of time+labelled.

Is "a binary tree in the form of playing N questions" the best way to go
through them, or are there other options? Should we allow navigation in more
than one dimensions at a time? Could we start with a few landmark,
prototypical elements in each dimension? Have the user progressively clamp
down the range in components, and show a PCA of the remaining components each
time? Would a 3rd dimension (with VR?) help separate more dimensions at a
time, giving you 50% more dimensions to show items on?

Computers are increasingly understanding our world and so far they understand
it through these meaning spaces, so I think this would be incredibly important
for the future of UI design and computer interpretability.

------
mgamache
It will be interesting to watch as they improve this process. I use Stitch
Fix, and I don't feel like it's all that personalized. The problem is that as
a consumer you don't see all the products they _could_ have selected for you.
Maybe there's three options for male jeans, maybe there's fifty, it's opaque
to the user. The result is a little disappointing because as an American
consumer my options are nearly unlimited (only my time is constrained).

~~~
jatsign
I think that's the point of stitchfix - you're outsourcing your shopping to
them to save time. It's been years since I went to a store and bought clothes.
Clicking around on Amazon is really hit or miss - maybe the actual product
looks like you thought, and maybe the colors were a bit off, plus you have to
put together outfits that go together.

I'm also a Stitch fix user and I think that they've done a great job of
finding clothes that I like and the note from the stylist says "hey you can
pair these new jeans with that shirt you got last month". And I didn't have to
spend anytime thinking about it.

However, it's reached the point where they may be TOO dialed in. The clothes I
got this month were almost the same as last month. Do I really need another
polo?

I'll probably change to their "delivery every 2-3 months" option, since after
6 months of using them I have enough new clothes.

~~~
anchpop
I'd love to use stitchfix, but they continue the tired trend of clothing
retailers not selling clothes in my size. I have a friend who wears a 30/36
jeans, and he buys all his clothes from a cowboy store in Arizona. I'd rather
not have to go down that path but clothes that fit me seem harder to come by
every year

------
tw1010
Engineering is clearly reaching a point where it is and will be much more
integrated and coupled with pure and applied mathematics. I think it's more
than time to start taking this implicit project seriously by making it
explicit. We aught to think back to the foundations of the way we think about
programming in the first place, and we should try to build a new mindset which
takes the best parts of the hacker spirit and the pure mathematics mindset and
create something new, something more fitting to the enviourment we've found
ourselves in, where essentially the only limits to what we can produce is our
ability to imagine them.

~~~
gmfawcett
That's an optimistic idea, and I don't want to discourage optimism. But a
common trait shared by both engineering and mathematics is the notion of
_constraints_. The limits of what we can produce in such an idealized
math/engineering framework are likely not to be our imaginative limits, but
the inherent and necessary limits of the objects and abstractions that
math/engg rely upon. You might discover that axioms, rules, boundary
conditions, and formal abstractions can't produce the liberating blank-canvas
that an imaginative hacker/artist would dream of -- at least not without
throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

~~~
tw1010
From one perspective, coding is just dry formal automata theory. But that's
not how most coders think about it. We've developed more playful ways to think
and learn about it. And the more experience one has with coding, the more one
can ignore the details and just think with feelings and intuition. The same
effect occurs after a mountain of experience with pure mathematics. After a
while, it starts to change the way you think. The brain internalizes it, and
makes it accessible on a much more natural plane than how you think about
maths when you're starting out, when everything is detail and hard work. It's
these two worlds I want integrated. I want the abstractions coders think about
on a daily basis to be enriched by a rejuvenating syringe of math juice.

------
afpx
This is a great article, and it reveals some interesting new ideas to test
out. However, I wish they included examples that qualitatively demonstrate how
effective each improvement was. Some of us don’t have a team of almost 100
high-end data scientists like they do. Since I only have a couple of people, I
need to always be careful to focus on techniques with ROI (low implementation
cost, (relatively) high effectiveness). Machine learning can be labor
intensive.

------
WC3w6pXxgGd
Do these writers expect anybody but themselves to understand this post?

~~~
wenc
I think the audience is more the quantitative "data science"/ machine learning
crowd.

The nice friendly web design makes this look deceptively simple (and it is if
you have the right background), but this type of material is not aimed at a
general audience.

At the same time, as noted by another commenter, this isn't arXiv material
either.

It's somewhere in between.

------
tempodox
I don't get it. They seem to have blogs. Do they sell anything?

~~~
nkurz
Stitch Fix is a profitable company that recently had an IPO. Their business is
mostly subscription: each month they send a small selection of clothes chosen
by a stylist. The customers keeps (and pays for) the ones they like, and
returns the rest. Here's an overview:
[https://www.sramanamitra.com/2017/06/15/billion-dollar-
unico...](https://www.sramanamitra.com/2017/06/15/billion-dollar-unicorns-
stitch-fix-delivers-a-surprisingly-fresh-take-on-shopping-for-fashion/)

------
nl
Hmm.

So I have mixed feelings about this. I think it is good that StichFix is
publishing how they work, and I have complete admiration for what they have
achieved.

I _still_ use their post about the ability to add a "pregnant" vector to an
item of clothing and find a similar item in a maternity version to explain how
objects can be embedded in a vector space.

But this post seems both too complicated for the general reader, and not deep
enough for a paper.

