• October 2, 2023
• HDSIComm

The Uneasy Relation Between Deep Learning and Statistics

Deep learning uses the language and tools of statistics and classical machine learning, including empirical and population losses and optimizing a hypothesis on a training set. But it uses these tools in regimes where they should not be applicable: the optimization task is non-convex, models are often large enough to overfit, and the training and deployment tasks can radically differ. In this talk I will survey the relation between deep learning and statistics. In particular we will discuss recent works supporting the emerging intuition that deep learning is closer in some aspects to human learning than to classical statistics. Rather than estimating quantities from samples, deep neural nets develop broadly applicable representations and skills through their training. The talk will not assume background knowledge in artificial intelligence or deep learning.