Everyday ML Questions

Thanks for inviting us!
I’m always been fascinated by multi-choice questions because they are an excellent way to exercise your brain.
When I’m studying something new, I need to find ways to practice. Sometimes building projects is the way, but sometimes that’s not an option.
So we decided to build a site that would help people with their machine learning and data science journeys. Not to overwhelm people and make them sit through a long exam, but to go at it in different way: a little bit every day.
Bnomial tries really hard to do what I want for my life: to build a learning habit.

Our goal is not to compete with blog posts, tutorials, videos, or books. Those are great!
Our goal is to become a different component of your learning journey. One that’s fun, doesn’t take a long time, and will stick with you for a long time.

Have you thought of doing something like duolingo eventually? I use it for learning German

This is an interesting question.
Here is where we are headed in the short term: creating a scoring system that encourages people to show up and answer more questions.
Letting you know where you stand, and helping you track your improvements over time is key.
Right after that, we’ll see where we want to take this. We are taking it one step at a time.

By the way, that’s what duolingo does as well - they really built-in gamification into learning and did it pretty well. If you haven’t used it previously, check it out

Yeah, I’ve used it. My daughter learns French through it.

Hey Shaksham Kapoor!

1. You’ll see purely theoretical and practical questions. They range from probabilities and statistics, to algorithms, machine learning, data analysis, game theory and pretty much anything under the Artificial Intelligence umbrella. This is on purpose: our goal is not to tackle one specialized narrow area, but to find ways to increase the knowledge we all have.
   
2. Some of these are problems we deal with every day. Some are the result of what we read or conversations we have with others.
   
3. Absolutely! If it’s useful, there’s a place for it here.

Thank you for your response!!
Another question, we have certifications for data science like “AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty”, any plans to cover questions asked in these exams in the future?
PS: of course not just focused on AWS but in general if anyone wants to prepare for a certification exam.
> I like the way the questions are posted, like storytelling, so it helps connect things quickly + we don’t forget it easily 🙂

I’d love to cover some of those questions—at least the core learnings they are trying to evaluate!

That would really be helpful. I know these certifications do have suggested learning paths to help prepare for the exams, but they are more focused around their ecosystem and how it is used for performing data science.
As you mention, if there is a possibility to cover generic things that any of these certifications evaluate on, then it’s worth looking at 🙂

definitely!

The hardest question so far was the one we published on April 19. It was about the Softmax activation function.
The easiest question was the one we published on April 30. It was about the definition of hyperparameter tuning.

What was the question on april 19? maybe you could share the pages from the book with it? really curious about it

Here is the question:

Hmm I initially wanted to say it’s one, but softmax doesn’t get the input to the network. It gets the output of the previous dense layer.
It also doesn’t return the index or the max value, so 2 and 4 are also our.
The closest is 3, but it doesn’t sort the probabilities…
So which one is it? =)

2 and 4 don’t say that softmax returns that thing. They say that softmax is a version of the function that returns that thing.

Basically, Option 2 says that Softmax is a smooth version of argmax
Option 4 says that Softmax is a smooth version of max.

I guess then it’s probably that this value is max… then it’s option 4?
But I understand now why it was the most difficult one =)
Thanks for sharing it!

Here is part of the answer 🙂

Nice, thanks!

How many people got this one right?

Can’t tell. We were’t storing individual data back then. We were only tracking correct choices (every question has up to 4 correct choices.)

So I can tell you the overall performance, but not how many people got it correctly.

But yeah, it’s been by far the most difficult question. Very tricky + dense wording = HARD

And also curious to know how you work together on this. How does the process look like?

I write one question every day and review and schedule another question.
Vladimir does the first round of reviews to everything I write. When he finishes, I let it sit for a couple of weeks before I do the final review.
Leaving some time between the writing and the editing session is key to get a much stronger question.
In summary, we write a question, then they go through a couple editing sessions before they get scheduled.

When I write questions I try to write a couple at once. However, I have to admit recently Santiago is writing almost all of them…
One interesting thing is that we do this fully asynchronously. We have a GitHub repo and we use the issues. One issue is one question. The one who writes it assigns it to the other one for review. We use several labels to track where the question is in the pipeline.

Hey Adanai, answering the daily question is completely free and it will stay that way.
We are charging money for the book with every monthly question, but that’s a byproduct of what we really want to accomplish: get people to show up every day and learn something new.

Thanks, Merve!
We are planning to enable a Discord server so people can get together and discuss individual questions.
Regarding collaborations, we are taking it very slow because we aren’t sure how to compensate people yet. Right now, I’m working with a person that reached out to me to try and explore how collaborations would look like. Based on the experience, we will open it up to more people in the future.
(The main issue with collaborations is compensation and rights. We are using this question as comercial content, so we need to ensure we retain the rights to the questions. That’s why we want to compensate those who contribute.)

Thank you for the answer.

This is a great question. Just for now, the subscription will get people every question we publish, but we will not stop there.
We have several ideas to improve that subscription over time. Without promising much, I can tell you that there’s a lot of value in a community of machine learning and data scientist professionals, so we are thinking on ways we can tap on that and connect companies with individuals.

I like to think about the books as a reference. The goal is to have people coming to the website every day and answering the questions. As Santiago mentioned, we are working on a kind of a leaderboard to gamify the process a little bit 🙂
The book is if you want to go through the old questions. Maybe you had a problem at work and remembered that you saw the question on Bnomial and want to check it again and follow the reference link. Or maybe you are preparing for an interview and want to test your knowledge on past questions? Then you need the book.

By the way, Gur Hevroni I didn’t know about TheDailyByte. Seems to be pretty similar.

That’s my super power 🙂
I draw inspiration all around me, from the problems I face, the books I read, the conversations I have.

I guess this is what happens when you tweet multiple times per day for more than a year? 😃

I think we already kind of do this sometimes. There are certain questions on more basic concepts and the explanation gives you more background about.
Like for example, questions about the bias and variance trade-off.

I didn’t know about Lindsey Martin and #DailyML - thanks for sharing! It certainly looks very interesting and I’ll check it out in more detail.
I couldn’t find the subreddit you mentioned, is it maybe r/learnmachinelearning?
And regarding discussions - I totally agree! This is something we have on the roadmap - a community where people can discuss about the questions.

Vladimir Haltakov I found on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lindseym1_dailyml-activity-6933281680547868672-e_9L

Thanks 🙂 The image is in fact AI-generated using VQGAN + CLIP. I wrote more how this is done here: https://twitter.com/haltakov/status/1455982555610636291
After that Santiago did some more processing to get the final look 🙂

Thanks for the link! AI-generated picture for the book about AI, that totally makes sense 🙂

Yeah, that was the goal 🙂

Thank you! Yes, creating this type of question is more difficult than the usual trivia questions, but they teach you much more.
They are all multiple choice for now (and usually more than one choice can be correct), but we also have an idea how we can extend them a bit so you will have to write some simple code.

Interesting. We are not affiliated with her, but I’ll check her work out!

Thanks!

You are right.
Funny story: a few weeks into this, we decided to change the way the colors and symbols work. For some reason, I talk myself into believing that the new way was better.
We released it. People hated it so much that we reverted back a few hours later.
I do agree with you: we need to think about it a little bit more carefully.

For now, it’s mostly random, although I try to ensure that questions covering similar topics don’t go out close to each other.
We have a little bit of everything: there are purely theoretical questions, and other more practical ones. We are planning to keep it that way with a slight bias towards practicality.
And undoubtedly, the flavor of the questions highly depends on our own knowledge and experience. For example, I don’t have time-series analysis experience, so it’s hard for me to write about that.

Hey Prateek! Thanks for the comment!
For now, we are focused on bringing a community of people that want to learn while answering these practical questions.

My focus is 100% on helping them build a new habit. Something they can do every day and make improvements without even noticing.

Santiago Thank you

Oh, we have this feature already 🙂
You can click LOGIN in the menu of the main page and enter your email. We will send you the new question every day then 🙂

This might help:

But point well taken: we need to make sure this is more obvious.

I have registered 2 days ago and receive daily just one email with the question, no more and no less. To me everything is very convenient 🙂

oh, i missed this! thank you!

No worries. I need to do a better job at making sure that’s obvious.