TANSTAAFL: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch … but there’s always crumbs for the taking.

Machine learning won’t necessarily make a complete discovery by uncovering some ground-breaking pattern in isolation, but more likely a fragment or clue or signature that could lead somewhere. I always remind myself that there are infinitely many more non-linear formulations than linear ones potentially lurking in nature, yet humans are poorly-equipped to solve most non-linear relationships. ML has started to look at the tip of the non-linear iceberg and humans have to be alert when it uncovers a crumb. Recall that pattern recognition and signal processing are well-established disciplines in their own right, yet consider the situation of searching for patterns in signals hiding in the data but unknown in structure. That’s often all we are looking for — some foot-hold to start from.