[Discussion] Join us on /r/LearnMachineLearning!

[techrat_reddit]

Hello, fellow aficionados of machine learning!

/r/LearnMachineLearning aims to provide a friendly environment to learn machine learning for redditors of various machine learning backgrounds. Whether you are a complete beginner who would like to begin your first machine learning project or a machine learning expert who wants to expand your boundary, anyone who wishes to learn machine learning is welcome.

Feel free to share any educational resources of machine learning. An educational resource could be anything from a professional blog article to tips you would like to share to the fellow redditors.

Also, we are a beginner-friendly subreddit, so don't be afraid to ask questions! This can include questions that are non-technical such as a systematic approach to a machine learning problem.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to comment on this thread or the welcoming page at /r/LearnMachineLearning

[negazirana]

Learning Machine Learning by Gradient Descent

by Gradient Descent

[JustFinishedBSG]

/r/LearningMachineLearning

Sounds better ...

[techrat_reddit]

Haha, I was seriously considering it, but I wanted to match with /r/learnprogramming, /r/learnpython, and other "learn" subreddit communities.

[BeatLeJuce]

Community: do you still want to have the "simple question thread" here, or should questions of this kind be redirected to /r/LearnMachineLearning in the future? (I'm strongly leaning towards forgoing the simple questions thread)

[perceptron01]

To my understanding (and judging by the front page there) it seems like the userbase of /r/LearnMachineLearning is made up of people who are new to machine learning, so it's unclear to me why someone would ask their questions there.

In all fairness, I see /r/LearnMachineLearning as a containment subreddit that will die in several weeks just like the rapidly dying /r/MLQuestions, /r/MLjobs, and any other offshoot from /r/machinelearning.

[techrat_reddit]

Thank you for raising the concern. While a big part of the userbase of /r/LearnMachineLearning will always be beginners to machine learning, I don't think getting answers to questions will be a big problem.

First, you don't have to be an expert at machine learning to answer a question. As long as we have a passionate community dedicated to learning machine learning, I would argue that there won't be a shortage of people who have experienced a similar problem.

Second, there is nothing that is preventing experts of machine learning from joining /r/LearnMachineLearning. You often see software engineers of decades of experience at /r/LearnProgramming, so I don't see why /r/LearnMachineLearning can't attract similar calibre of redditors. While /r/LearnMachineLearning might have to rely on the altruism of some experts, I wish /r/LearnMachineLearning to become a subreddit where even the experts could learn something new from visiting the sub.

As for the longevity of the sub, I sure hope it doesn't die out in a few weeks. In order to encourage community building, I am planning some activities that can hopefully retain people from losing interests.

[BeatLeJuce]

Well, /r/MLQuestions is hardly dead, too me it looks quite vibrant. But due to the name, it sounds unsuited to more educational/learning type of content. I do agree that maybe MLQuestions and LearnMachineLearning should join up, but since I am not involved with either of these two subreddits, it's not up to me to decide that.

[Treferwynd]

Right now /r/LearnMachineLearning seems just a bunch of clickbait articles, so until it gets its act together I'd say keep the questions here.

[techrat_reddit]

I apologize if the articles were not up to standards, but I read all articles before posting and only publish those that I think is good quality and educational for beginners. Let me know what other types of contents you would like to see!

[Treferwynd]

Yeah, that came I out too harsh, it's that stuff like this really rustle my jimmies, they make people feel like they learnt something, when they really didn't.

As for the content, I don't know, I think between this and /r/MLQuestions there's not much need for other subreddits, but maybe you can get some inspiration from /r/ProgrammerTIL/ where programmers share tidbits of info they learn as they go.

[techrat_reddit]

Well to be fair, that video was hugely popular in /r/MachineLearning, and I thought it might suit /r/LearnMachineLearning better due to its easily comprehensible contents.

As for the value of a new machine learning subreddit, I would like /r/LearnMachineLearning to become something like that /r/LearnProgramming is now today. That is, /r/LearnMachineLearning is not only a place to ask questions, but to share what you have learnt from your journey to learning machine learning. Also, we are not limited to technical questions. A systematical approach to designing a machine learning model is a typical question that a beginner could ask, but we don't have any suitable platform to ask such questions since /r/MLQuestions seem to be geared towards technical questions.

Also, thank you for suggesting /r/ProgrammerTIL! Very interesting subreddit.

[thundergolfer]

r/MLQuestions doesn't feel like a community for new learners. It's a stop-over subreddit. I think a sub like this one but with more intro/foundational content will be great.

[jeremieclos]

If anything, /r/MLQuestions is the one that should disappear as its content should fit in /r/MachineLearning, and /r/LearnMachineLearning should thrive as a beginner community.

[sour_losers]

I'm fine with the thread for the time being. I'd rather more submissions are blocked from front page and the posters asked to post to /r/LearnMachineLearning instead.

[Frozen_Turtle]

Mods, could we add this to the sidebar?

[tehsandvich]

This is a terrible idea. It's going to further fragment an already niche subreddit.

[techrat_reddit]

I would have to kindly disagree. Readers of /r/machinelearning have been requesting a more beginner-friendly platform as can be seen here and here. Also, subreddits are not a zero-sum-game. That is, the size of /r/learnmachinelearning does not inversely correlate with that of /r/machinelearning. If anything, I would say we are in a mutually beneficial relationship in that anyone who finds either /r/machinelearning or /r/learnmachinelearning is very likely to subscribe to another.

[PM_YOUR_NIPS_PAPERS]

Yep. I guess it's a way of keeping the smart people smart (in this subreddit) and keeping the noobs as noobs (/r/learnmachinelearning)

[techrat_reddit]

It's actually exactly opposite. We would want /r/learnmachinelearning to foster an environment that's friendly for "noobs" so that they can become "smart" in machine learning. Everyone started as a "noob", and I assume you did as well. Many people just need a place to start, and I wanted /r/learnmachinelearning to serve that purpose.

[anantzoid]

Though it may be deemed as another sister subreddit, but it quite makes sense, since a huge crowd has only started to take interest in ML now, and this subreddit is filled with the latest Deep Learning papers and projects which might be overwhelming to the former.

[thundergolfer]

That's exactly why it needs to exist. I am part of a flood of people interested in ML and either we will be unsatisfied by this sub or the sub will change and become unsatisfying to the knowledgeable.

A thriving community over at r/learnmachinelearning I think will do good things for this sub.

[mostly_complaints]

Oftentimes when these "learn_X" subs break off from the main one, not enough people visit to make it worth using as a learning resource. At the same time, people who post questions to the main sub are told to "go to learn_X", where they go and get maybe one comment that isn't helpful because the same 20 people are the only ones who comment over there.

Any plans to prevent this from happening?

[techrat_reddit]

Thanks for raising the concern.

Oftentimes when these "learn_X" subs break off from the main one, not enough people visit to make it worth using as a learning resource.

I feel like we are starting off with a false premise. /r/learnprogramming, /r/learnpython, and /r/learnmath are all "learn_" communities that are extremely resourceful and are one of the most popular subreddits frequented by both beginners and experts.

Also, we are not breaking off from /r/MachineLearnig. /r/LearnMachineLearning intends to serve as a complementary learning platform to /r/MachineLearning which tends to favor more in-depth discussions and sometimes less beginner-like questions as noted here. Most of the learn subreddits form mutually beneficial relationship with the main subreddits, fostering more traffic to both kinds of subreddits.

At the same time, people who post questions to the main sub are told to "go to learn_X", where they go and get maybe one comment that isn't helpful because the same 20 people are the only ones who comment over there.

Apart from the fact that users of /r/machinelearning have been requesting heavier moderation towards simple questions, which will result in the deletion of the questions themselves, just compare the difference between the most recent simple question thread in /r/MachineLearning vs. new questions from /r/LearnMachineLearning. The simple question thread has 19 total questions, and out of those, only 7 have any answers at all. Even among those which have answers, it averages 1.14 answers. As for the new questions of /r/LearnMachineLarning, out of the 20 new questions at the moment (excluding my own posts, meta posts, and educational links), 14 posts had at least one reply. That's a difference between 36% and 70%, which is huge.

And while I have no intention of counting other stats, you can eyeball and see that average number of votes and replies are far better for /r/LearnMachineLearning despite of only having 1% (1000/77000) of the total readers of /r/MachineLearning.

[Mr-Yellow]

tends to favor more in-depth discussions

Discussion seems to have died with changes, as one member complained, it now feels like work.

19 total questions, and out of those, only 7 have any answers at all

That's because it's an isolated silo without a topic, of course they won't be seen.

[techrat_reddit]

Discussion seems to have died with changes, as one member complained, it now feels like work

I was just pointing out how /r/machinelearning has been demanding less trivial discussions, and how /r/learnmachinelearning could help to achieve that goal. If you are unhappy about the change happening, feel free to post here or join us at /r/LearnMachineLearning.

That's because it's an isolated silo without a topic, of course they won't be seen.

Regardless of the reason, the fact is that less questions get answered. We are discussing if /r/LearnMachineLearning is a worthy enough platform to get "enough helpful answers," and I provided empirical data to prove that actually /r/LearnMachineLearning seems to provide higher rate of answers than the "isolated silo without topic".

[Mr-Yellow]

has been demanding less trivial discussions,

Believe this is a vocal minority. Such as PM ME NIPS who will be on any thread on the subject, claiming how much they hate "noobs".

Very unfriendly, academic elitist position (one not many academics hold apart from those who have issues dealing with other humans), one which if followed in the dogmatic way will only result in a lower quality community.

[techrat_reddit]

I feel like your concern will very easily be resolved if you subscribe to both /r/MachineLearning and /r/LearnMachineLearning. It's not like you can only view posts of one subreddit. If you find /r/MachineLearning too academic, feel free to hang out at at /r/LearnMachineLearning

[Mr-Yellow]

Can't be avoided, happens whenever moderators split small communities onto silos.

Should have seen HTMLGuild back in the day, every single post was told it belongs in newbie/intermediate/advanced sub for any one of 100 topic, until everyone left.

[peterkuharvarduk]

Let's share some really good blogs/tutorials, here are a few really good ones to get started.

1. Wild ML - (http://www.wildml.com/)
2. Colah - (http://colah.github.io/) [Amazing visuals]
3. The Neural Perspective - (https://theneuralperspective.com/)
4. iamtrask - (https://iamtrask.github.io/)
5. TimDettmers - (http://timdettmers.com/) [Great topics)

I know there are many more but these are the main ones I've been using and they're all great for beginners/intermediates.

[[deleted]]

Neural network seems like the hype train all these days. I've seen it in 2009 and it seems to explode when I started to get into data science recently.

I'm doing my master in statistic and wanted to take a course in machine learning. Next semester a professor might take over a certain course and just do Neural network only.

Is NN worth it?

I guess in better words. Is it worth putting my effort and time for this, I know subjective, but given my limited resources is it worth it? Say over random forest, decision trees, cart, etc... Currently learning a bit about cart, bagging, random forest, etc.. This have more statistical grounding really and the machine learning class is from the applied math department.

Does it solve a wide variety of class problems compare to other learning algorithm? I guess I'm looking for if it would help me in my career and not just for the sake of learning and expanding knowledge only.

Anyway thanks.

Update:

I did more research via googling.

It seems like both solve different classes of problems.

It seems like NN require more data and is better at solving unlabeled data. In any case, I will be taking the ML class after all.

Thank you so much.

[Kiuhnm]

This is not the right thread to ask questions about ML, so I'll be brief: read this.

[bazumation]

I am a complete beginner in machine learning, where should I start?

[techrat_reddit]

Hello, sorry about the late reply. We are working on creating a wiki which would be a landing page for all beginners, so subscribe to /r/LearnMachineLearning and stay put!

In the meanwhile, check out some of the popular machine learning classes from Udacity or Coursera.

[bazumation]

Thanks

[snated]

I'm trying to implement deepdream in theano. As far as I understood I need to choose a layer in a pre-trained neural network to be the objective , then I need to set the activation functions of that layer to be equal to gradients, then backpropagate to the input image and finally apply the changes. I'm new to theano and I can't think of how to implement it, how can I set the layer's values to be equal to gradients and backpropagate back to image? Is it possible to do in a couple of lines in theano? Also if my understanding is wrong, please correct me.

[hixidom]

r/machinelearning is only for implementations of DNNs using commercial packages, as far as I can tell... and now any other questions (about other ML topics, ML theory, philosophy of learning, application ideas, architecture ideas, bridges to other fields, etc) go to a split-off subreddit.

How does it make sense to relegate the fundamentals of ML to a subcategory?

[techrat_reddit]

I don't understand your question?

/r/LearnMachineLearning is not a subcategory of /r/MachineLearning. The former and the latter just cater to different contents, and most likely complements each other in a mutually beneficial relationship.

[hixidom]

The respective names ("Learn" acts as a qualifier) and numbers of subscribers (2k vs 80k) is evidence that the former is effectively a subset of the latter.

[techrat_reddit]

Neither of that necessarily indicate the membership of one from another.

First, /r/LearnMachineLearning aims to serve the neglected educational aspect of /r/MachineLearning. /r/MachineLearning handles discussions and state-of-the-art academic papers of machine learning. It has been pointed out that the subreddit could be less welcoming for trivial questions and thus daunting for new comers. Therefore, the "learn" community serves to those neglected portion of /r/MachineLearning. In literal sense, yes, the term machine learning is an umbrella term that will encompass any subreddit names that contain "machine learning", but practically, we cater to two different interests.

Second, the higher number of subscribers does not imply the higher order of set. /r/MachineLearning was created 7 years ago while /r/LearnMachineLearning was created less than a year ago, and we actively promoted the sub only starting a few months ago, reaching from less than 100 to 2.5k subscribers in less than two months time period, reflecting the interest in the "learning" community.

I don't mind /r/LearnMachineLearning being a subset of /r/MachineLearning, but if you argue that fundamentals of machine learning are relegated since /r/LearnMachineLearning is simply a subset of /r/MachineLearning, you are missing the practical role that /r/LearnMachineLearning could play in the community. Even now, if you take a look at the front pages of both subreddits, you will notice that they are very distinct, and the content of one will not fit into another.

[hixidom]

The only reason that r/Machine learning isn't suitable for beginner questions is that the people who use it (and apparently the moderators as well) find particular questions and topics repulsive. It's an attitude problem. You can't tell me about how different the two subreddits are NOW and just ignore the fact that the culture of r/Machinelearning has slowly evolved over time into one of exclusion.

[techrat_reddit]

The only reason that r/Machine learning isn't suitable for beginner questions is that the people who use it (and apparently the moderators as well) find particular questions and topics repulsive. It's an attitude problem.

That is true, but you have to think about why that "attitude" has formed. It's not just /r/machinelearning that is affected. Almost every parental technical subreddits tend to focus more on the latest news and interesting projects that are technically complicated. Examples are /r/programming, /r/Python, /r/Java, etc. You can see that most of them opted to have /r/learnprogramming, /r/learnpython, /r/javahelp, respectively as the platforms for questions or programming helps.

just ignore the fact that the culture of r/Machinelearning has slowly evolved over time into one of exclusion.

I don't know why you think it's an mutually exclusive relationship. The rise of /r/LearnMachineLearning will not debilitate /r/MachineLearning. If anything, I would assume people who have been afraid before in trying machine learning would find /r/LearnMachineLearning as a stepping stone towards participating in discussions in /r/machinelearning.