Scalable Machine Learning Overview
Scalable Machine Learning Overview
Semi-supervised learning improves model performance by leveraging the structure of the unlabeled data to better understand the underlying data distribution, providing more context than what is available from the limited labeled data alone. It enables the model to generalize better by utilizing approaches like self-training and consistency regularization .
Exact inference, using methods like Variable Elimination and Belief Propagation, computes exact posterior probabilities but can be computationally infeasible for large or complex models due to their exponential time complexity. Approximate methods, such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo and Variational Inference, offer feasible solutions by approximating distributions through sampling or optimization, trading accuracy for scalability .
DQN integrates convolutional neural networks to process high-dimensional inputs, using experience replay and target networks to stabilize learning, addressing issues of non-stationary data and correlated updates present in Q-learning. These strategies improve the robustness and convergence of learning over traditional Q-learning methods .
Active learning reduces annotation costs in NLP by using strategies like uncertainty sampling, where the model identifies samples where predictions are most uncertain to be labeled by human annotators. By focusing resources on the most informative data points, it minimizes the total amount of labeled data required for training .
Active learning optimizes the labeling process by selectively querying the most informative samples, reducing the number of labels needed compared to passive learning. It uses strategies like uncertainty sampling and expected model change to focus labeling efforts only where they will most improve model performance, thereby increasing efficiency .
Graph-based methods are preferred in semi-supervised learning involving relational data because they naturally model and exploit the relationships between data points as graph structures. They propagate labels through connections, capturing the relationships that static models might miss and enhancing model performance on relational datasets .
Online learning processes data incrementally, one data point at a time, which is effective for streaming data where it arrives continuously, while distributed learning handles large-scale datasets by dividing computation across multiple machines, enabling parallel training. This approach is often facilitated by frameworks like Apache Spark, TensorFlow, or PyTorch distributed .
Federated learning trains models across decentralized devices without moving the data, keeping user data locally on devices like mobile phones. This increases privacy and security, making it ideal for privacy-sensitive applications like personal device data processing .
Reinforcement learning differs from supervised learning as it focuses on learning from interactions with the environment to maximize cumulative reward, rather than learning from a predefined set of labeled data. It involves an agent making sequential decisions with potential long-term impacts, whereas supervised learning usually involves predicting a single output from a given input without considering sequential interdependencies .
In Bayesian learning, 'prior' refers to the initial belief about the parameters before observing any data and represents the hypothesis space. 'Likelihood' is the probability of the observed data given these parameters. When combined, they are used to compute the 'posterior', which is the updated belief about the parameters after taking the evidence into account, via Bayes' theorem .