[Discussion] Are reasoning and logic skills essential for ML research?

Submitted by huberemanuel t3_y4o2se in MachineLearning

I find myself in the following scenario: I read many papers and books, and I can replicate many of the ideas I find and also combine them, but when I must create my own thoughts I get somewhat stuck. It is as if my brain gets stuck in “pattern recognition” to identify which of the ideas I have already learned fit the current context, instead of using the “creation” mode.

Back in time, when I participated in programming contests, it was not enough to know the main techniques and problems, it was also necessary to have good reasoning and logic skills to apply them in solving certain problems. So it seems vital to me to have these skills for research in ML (or in other areas), yet I have never seen anyone talking about this in universities, lectures, or books.

Do you think it is an essential skill? If yes, how do you do to have these skills sharp?

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zyl1024 t1_isfpphh wrote

Of course. Can you identify weaknesses (or even straight BS) from papers (spoiler alert, almost none of them are perfect)? These will be good sources for ideas and inspirations for new research, and would definitely require critical thinking, reasoning, logic, analysis skills.

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huberemanuel OP t1_iso6o9l wrote

Could you share how you keep your logical skills sharp?

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OkYak2915 t1_isgpk6r wrote

I suppose it is. It’s like you have all the tools needed for the job but don’t know how to handle them. I’m not any expert on the field but as far as my projects they somewhat brought a certain “essence” that resembled you of a problem you once faced or studied.

I’m not sure how you acquire your skills but I’ve tried videos, books and articles and the one that mostly developed my skill was “training” like coding a mini-project or running an EDA or even applying ML to a small dataset. Of course you need to get the knowledge from books and videos but other peoples projects are also a really good source. So I recommend taking a look on Kaggle.

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huberemanuel OP t1_iso6q5a wrote

Sure, Kaggle would be a great place to practice more. Thanks

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