District Data Labs - Visual Diagnostics for More Informed Machine Learning: Part 2

Note: Before starting Part 2, be sure to read Part 1! When it comes to machine learning, ultimately the most important picture to have is the big picture. Whether it's logistic regression, random forests, Bayesian methods, support vector machines, or neural nets, everyone seems to have their favorite! Unfortunately these discussions tend to truncate the challenges of machine learning into a single problem, which is a particularly problematic misrepresentation for people who are just getting started with machine learning. Sure, picking a good model is important, but it's certainly not enough (and it's debatable whether a model can actually be'good' devoid of the context of the domain, the hypothesis, the shape of the data, and the intended application. In this post we'll discuss model selection in the context of the big picture, which I'll present in terms of the model selection triple, and we'll explore a set of visual tools for navigating the triple.