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Both Software Engineering and Machine Learning have become recognized disciplines. In this article I analyse the combination of the two: engineering of machine learning applications. I believe the systematic way of working for machine learning applications is at certain points different from traditional (rule-based) software engineering. The question I set out to investigate is “How does software engineering change when we develop machine learning applications”?. This question is not an easy to answer and turns out to be a rather new, with few publications. This article collects what I have found until now.
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Youyou et al. showed that from 70 likes the algorithm could predict the personality better than friends, from 150 likes better than family members and from 300 likes even better than the test person himself. However, the machine learning algorithm does not know the person better than the colleagues, the friends or the person themselves. The machine can "only", after sufficient "supervised learning" trials (iterations), determine the correlation between the click behaviour on Facebook and the scored Big5 factors better than individuals. Prediction replaces the Big5 questionnaire. But we are not getting closer to the personality of people than with the Big5 questionnaire. It is argued that - though data mining can help enormously - psychology remains a subject of the narrative in the end.
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In this post I give an overview of the theory, tools, frameworks and best practices I have found until now around the testing (and debugging) of machine learning applications. I will start by giving an overview of the specificities of testing machine learning applications.
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