Today's Deep Dive: Innovative Unsupervised Learning in AI

Categorically, artificial intelligence (AI) can appear be an odd juxtaposition of order and disorder -- we direct the AI with algorithms, yet the system produces new insights seemingly magically. Most of the well-known applications of machine learning and computational AI involve supervised learning. The modeler amasses a vast set of existing data (e.g., financial transactions, internet photographs, or the texts of tweets) and a base-level "ground truth" outcome that is already known, perhaps in retrospect or by expensive human investigation. Equipped with any number of computational algorithms, the scientist becomes the "supervisor" whose code trains the model to reproduce, in the lab, the known outcomes with a low probability of error. The models are then deployed to live a happy life scoring credit risk and fraud likelihood, finding pictures of Chihuahuas and muffins, or flagging insulting tweets.