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by fiatjaf
3495 days ago
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What is a problem geometric mean solve? That was my question the entire time. When people ask "why machine learning?" the answers are "machine learning can do these things blablabla", not "you must specify the problem you're trying to solve". |
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It gives you a way to average together two things that have units that have nothing to do with each other and then compare two such averages and have the comparison make sense, as long as your units were consistent.
As a silly example, say you want to average 1kg and 1m and compare that average to the average 2kg and 0.5m. With arithmetic mean, ignoring the fact that it's nonsense to add different units, you could get numbers like (1+1)/2 = 1 and (2+0.5)/2 = 1.25 if you use kg and m, but numbers like (1 + 100)/2 = 50.5 and (2 + 50)/2 = 26 if you use kg and cm. Notice that which one is bigger depends on your choice of units. On the other hand, the geometric mean of the two examples is always the same as long as you use consistent units: 1 for both if you use kg and m, and 10 for both if you use kg and cm.
In practice, this sort of operation is only useful if you have multiple measures of some sort along different axes (think performance on 3 different performance tests) and you're being forced to produce a single average number. Again, a fairly silly thing to do, but _very_ common: just about every single performance benchmark does this.