Big Data’s Mathematical Mysteries | Quanta Magazine
#BigData’s Mathematical Mysteries https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151203-big-datas-mathematical-mysteries/ Nice description of unsupervised analysis as ink diffusing from drops
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“In the last 15 years or so, researchers have created a number of tools to probe the geometry of these hidden structures. For example, you might build a model of the surface by first zooming in at many different points. At each point, you would place a drop of virtual ink on the surface and watch how it spread out. Depending on how the surface is curved at each point, the ink would diffuse in some directions but not in others. If you were to connect all the drops of ink, you would get a pretty good picture of what the surface looks like as a whole. And with this information in hand, you would no longer have just a collection of data points. Now you would start to see the connections on the surface, the interesting loops, folds and kinks. This would give you a map for how to explore it.”
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