Comment by mziel
10 years ago
Sometimes I get the idea that people in CS want to "get all this machine learning/data science stuff" without understanding the principles.
Sure, it's trivially easy to build a classifier in R/Scikit (or even code one up from scratch) so it may seem like it's no big deal. Similarily, it's trivially easy to hack up an inefficient SQL query, without knowledge of relational algebra or normal forms. But I would argue that some basic knowledge is essential in applying these things.
"Sometimes I get the idea that people in CS want to "get all this machine learning/data science stuff" without understanding the principles."
Thought I was the only one.
Not at all. People want easy things. Just look at all the companies that provide "Easy A/B testing" or "Easy lead scoring" via super-complicated-data-scienice-stuff-we-will-explain-in-1000-words-or-less-blogposts.
It doesn't matter that the results are absolute junk. Customers pay money so they can feel good. And it's easy.