Software Engineering Daily

Machine learning models can be built by plotting points in space and optimizing a function based off of those points.

For example, I can plot every person in the United States in a 3 dimensional space: age, geographic location, and yearly salary. Then I can draw a function that minimizes the distance between my function and each of those data points. Once I define that function, you can give me your age and a geographic location, and I can predict your salary.

Plotting these points in space is called embedding. By embedding a rich data set, and then experimenting with different functions, we can build a model that makes predictions based on those data sets. Yufeng Guo is a developer advocate at Google working on CloudML. In this show, we described two separate examples for preparing data, embedding the data points, and iterating on the function in order to train the model.

In a future episode, Yufeng will discuss CloudML and more advanced concepts of machine learning.

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