Is 'Unsupervised Learning' a Misconceived Term?
This is an incremental philosophical critique aimed at machine learning researchers and educators, questioning foundational terminology without introducing new methods or data.
The paper argues that all machine learning is supervised to some degree, challenging the traditional supervised vs. unsupervised categorization by proposing that algorithms like k-means and PCA are internally supervised by the data itself, and it suggests replacing this with a new categorization of internally or externally supervised learning.
Is all of machine learning supervised to some degree? The field of machine learning has traditionally been categorized pedagogically into $supervised~vs~unsupervised~learning$; where supervised learning has typically referred to learning from labeled data, while unsupervised learning has typically referred to learning from unlabeled data. In this paper, we assert that all machine learning is in fact supervised to some degree, and that the scope of supervision is necessarily commensurate to the scope of learning potential. In particular, we argue that clustering algorithms such as k-means, and dimensionality reduction algorithms such as principal component analysis, variational autoencoders, and deep belief networks are each internally supervised by the data itself to learn their respective representations of its features. Furthermore, these algorithms are not capable of external inference until their respective outputs (clusters, principal components, or representation codes) have been identified and externally labeled in effect. As such, they do not suffice as examples of unsupervised learning. We propose that the categorization `supervised vs unsupervised learning' be dispensed with, and instead, learning algorithms be categorized as either $internally~or~externally~supervised$ (or both). We believe this change in perspective will yield new fundamental insights into the structure and character of data and of learning algorithms.