K-Means Clustering.
Today I learnt about k-means clustering. This is another one of those fancy-sounding machine learning techniques that seems intimidating to the uninitiated. But actually, the intuition behind it is simple. Thanks to Youtube, you can understand the rudimental elements of this unsupervised machine learning algorithm fairly quickly. Here’s a video that got me over that hurdle.
Tomorrow, I’ll train a model using this technique.
Key takeway:
- Machine learning has so many techniques that it seems to me part of solving any problem with ML is first figuring out what data you need, and then researching and running experiments to figure out what the best algorithm to use is.
- Some of these algorithms are very old. Even when it comes to the latest breakthroughs with large language models — Geoffrey Hinton was using similar methods as far back as 1985 (albeit at a fraction of the scale today).