104Why does Naive Bayes work so well despite an assumption that is almost always false?▼mediumAmazonMicrosoftGoogle2 replies◆ premiumThe 'naive' independence assumption is wrong on real data, yet the classifier is a strong baseline for text. The interesting answer explains why classification survives a broken assumption, plus smoothing and the variants. Here it is.Open full answer →
53Design a large-scale text classification system (e.g. news categorization or topic tagging).▼mediumGoogleMetaAmazon2 replies◆ premiumTagging articles at scale is bread-and-butter ML, but the easy version fails three ways: it is multi-label, the taxonomy is hierarchical and keeps growing, and rare classes hide behind aggregate accuracy. The signal is the model choice plus how you handle all three.Open full answer →