[zengid]

Thanks for explaining. That seems to be the neat thing that I'm picking up on about what Microsoft Research people keep calling "Model Based Machine Learning" [0], in that you construct a model based on your assumptions about the problem, and by implementing it, the compiler can fit it to an appropriate algorithm.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKUFSKRjTIo and also https://github.com/dotnet/infer

[ssivark]

Yup! Their WIP book is a fantastic introductory read: http://www.mbmlbook.com/ (Needs only high school background)

Helps gain very nice and concrete intuition, before getting lost in math or code.