Description: Corey Chivers on P(A|B) ∝P(B|A)P(A)
Recently at home with my mom and sister and I was explaining a bit about the work I’m going to be doing in AI for digital pathology. We got talking about how there is so much data, but a scarcity of good labels, what self-supervised learning is and how it can help overcome this. As I was describing how it works, my sister was like “oh, ya, like this!” and pulled out a coloring book my nieces had been working on. Exactly!
In Magritte’s famous 1929 painting The Treachery of Images , a pipe is depicted with the caption “ Ceci n’est pas une pipe “, French for “This is not a pipe”. The seemingly dissonant statement under what is a very clearly depicted pipe forces the viewer to confront the distinction between the representation and the thing itself . The treachery refers to the danger involved in confusing the representation with the object.
Models – like images – are merely representations of the objects they depict. The modeler seeks to represent the relevant properties of the system being modeled in order to communicate some features of that system, or to manipulate it under ‘what-if’ scenarios.