
Where’s My Depth First Search Machine Learning? - gnad
https://medium.com/@old_sound/wheres-my-depth-first-search-machine-learning-6dd83436adab
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omalleyt
Three reasons you're not going to see a change like this in the algo:

1) Recommendations are somewhat economic substitutes, not economic
complements. Which is to say, most people look at the Amazon page for a given
book, then look through the associated recommendations, and (generally) choose
only one of the options.

2) If enough people actually bought Silent Spring after reading the Three Body
problem, then the Silent Spring would already show up in the recommendations,
because Amazon shows you recommendations based on what customers most similar
to you also bought

3) If Amazon had shown you Silent Spring BEFORE you read the Three Body
Problem, would you have even wanted to read it? Or would you have been like
wtf Amazon how is this related? My bet for the average customer is the latter.
Amazon can't make money by recommending you things that you won't even want
until two weeks later

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Iv
1) I don't see what is immutable about this logic. Next to the "people who
enjoyed that also enjoyed..." list there could be a "to go a bit deeper..." or
"books referenced by this book or author..."

2) The problem is in "enough". People who will want to read about that book
are only a niche and will never be more numerous than people who simply bought
the part II and III of the Three Body Problem (it is a trilogy). The author
here really points out an unaddressed problem.

3) Another argument to make a separate "book referenced by this book/author"

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dna_polymerase
Article not really related to Machine Learning. Rather clickbaity story about
how the author wants to see book referenced in a book to be recommended to him
prior to buying any book.

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gipp
I don't see how that's clickbaity, or unrelated to machine learning. No, it's
not a technical post, but it still raises an interesting point about what
recommendation systems are actually optimizing for and what's missed.

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comex
Regarding “clickbaity”, I clicked it hoping to hear about some interesting way
to apply the concept of depth first search to machine learning. The actual
subject, however, has nothing to do with depth first search: depth vs. breadth
first has to do with the _order_ in which links are traversed, but what the
author wants is for machine learning to discover links it currently doesn’t
know about at all (i.e. explicit textual references). However, this probably
isn’t _intentional_ clickbait; the author probably thought the analogy made
sense. (Maybe it does somehow and I’m just not seeing it.)

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foxh0und
I see it as the following, he views breadth first as just skimming over each
book, seeing the books that are related to it when sitting side by side
(perhaps when in another users cart), as opposed to depth, which goes into
each item, and then goes deeper picking out books from within that book.

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durovo
From what I understand, the author needs to brush up his knowledge about depth
first search. Scanning the book for references to other books would normally
be a part of breadth first search. Also, a bfs would yield books that are more
related to the selected book than a DFS.

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platz
but those books this new method finds might not be books that customers are
likely to buy, even with the new information. perhaps they are just bad books
but are still referenced in such a way.

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obiwahn
The reason you are not seeing this is that the problem is too hard for and
language is very complex.

There are Banks that would pay Millions if somebody could extract business
relations between companies. It would probably be enough in a fist step to
know what a company name is an see if 2 turn up in a sentence. The author is
asking for something that looks even harder to me. First identify book titles.
And then identify a recommendation. I think machine learners like to play with
images, because training is easy (recapture). But how should they go an tag
book contents for recommendations. It takes much more time than identifying
vehicles or traffic signs and requires more education.

Before analyzing something like that there will other things be done. Like
work on the structure of sentences (who interacts). Or if some statement has a
positive or negative tone.

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known
Mine is PageRank

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bluetwo
Bookstores are not libraries.

