

MLComp - The Best Method for your Data - xel02
http://mlcomp.org/

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physcab
Sorry for being a nay-sayer here, but I'm failing to see the value in this
service. I've been doing machine learning for about a year and in every case
my algorithms had to have been uniquely tied to my data. The performance of
various algorithms is tied to the dataset which is reflected in the code
through (sometimes many) parameters. It's a symbiotic relationship. So I'm not
sure how you can offer disparate services, unless you expect the client to
upload both the dataset and the code, and then offer a flexible compute
structure akin to EC2. I'd be careful though, because judging the performance
of algorithms on datasets not fitting the model can be a little disingenuous.

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xel02
I think you would use MLComp as a baseline. You have a set of data that you
can run generic algorithms on to show you what the best results are without
any further considerations.

It is also useful for researchers who develop new algorithms for a specific
dataset but then make it a generic algorithm. No research has the time to sit
there manually testing every dataset that they can find to see what their
algorithm works well on.

So for data set providers it gives them a quick look at what machine learning
can offer without a lot of development.

For researchers it gives them a chance to see a surprising result, maybe their
algorithm works well on a dataset they never considered.

~~~
physcab
I would argue the people that MLComp is trying to attract probably already
know about common machine learning techniques. And if that is the case, they
probably already know where to get good data (ie. Machine Learning
Repository). I'm one of the machine learning researcher's you speak of, and I
can tell you this is something I would not use--only because I apply the
algorithms I create on problems that I'm interested in and can find data for.
I don't ever think "gee, I've got this sweet algorithm, I wonder what it could
be used for." Instead I think, "this algorithm does clustering really well, I
bet it would work in this case". Then I go find that data. And data providers
don't care what happens to their data--that's why they provide it.

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the_real_r2d2
Machine learning as a service, very interesting. I found a similar site some
months ago. I looked over my bookmarks but I could not find it. The idea was
similar, you upload a data-set and they execute different learning algorithms
over it. I do not recall if you also provide an evaluation or they
automatically split the given data-set.

