Question: How hard is it to find the patterns?

Sreejita Ghosh answered on 8 Nov 2019: last edited 10 Nov 2019 6:54 pm

Thanks for your question. It was actually this question that brought me to this area of research: I like to look for patterns.
When we humans think of patterns, for some people it is easier to spot patterns intuitively than others. One way to find these patterns is by following the logical reasoning of the human minds that are quick at profiling and recognising patterns. Another way is by using ‘machine learning’. There are some hidden patterns which are almost impossible for humans to find out from a large dataset. However a machine does this task very quickly and easily.
For a human to spot these patterns the human would need to know quite a lot about the field to which the data belongs (medical, or animal science, or space science, or finance, or gene related). However when the machine searches for these patterns it does so by going through and comparing many examples using maths (by calculating how similar and how dissimilar two things are, and whether the similarities outweigh the dissimilarities). The patterns which my machine learning program found easily from the medical datasets I study, would have taken me ages to find if I had to look through the dataset by myself (actually, even if I had friends to search for these patterns with me, and even if we all had the medical expertise). So I use Maths to help me train the machine learning program to do this task much more efficiently than my friends and I would do manually. Feel free to ask me if you have any follow up questions or if this has not answered your question. ☺