Hi ,
A few years back, I decided to watch every Adam Sandler movie ever made.
Don't judge. I was doing my Masters at the time and was pretty exhausted by the end of each week.
As this was before the rise of Netflix, though, to achieve this goal, I first had to find DVD copies of all of Sandler's movies.
Before starting my quest, I thought this would be hard, since I had never noticed any Adam Sandler movies in the stores before. Yet, as soon as
I started looking for them, I realised they were everywhere.
In the space of a few weeks, I had the complete works of Adam Sandler on DVD.
Yet, in finding those films, I probably missed out on spotting a lot of other great movies in those stores.
Who knows?
The human brain is great at seeing what it's looking for and missing what it's not.
Here's the
thing...
When you're training a model to perform a task, by definition, you are training that model to look for a particular object, event or set of attributes.
And in the words of strategic adviser Matthew Schneider, "All analytics models do well at what
they are biased to look for."
But just like humans, if a model isn't looking for a particular thing, it's not going to spot it.
If all you care about is performing a single task, such as finding Adam Sandler films, then this might work fine. But don't be surprised
if you miss out on a lot of interesting stuff along the way.
Talk again soon,
Dr Genevieve Hayes.
