Limitations of supervised learning with deep networks
Like all statistical methods, supervised learning using neural
networks has important limitations. This is especially important when
one seeks to apply these methods, especially to physics problems. Like
all tools, DNNs are not a universal solution. Often, the same or
better performance on a task can be achieved by using a few
hand-engineered features (or even a collection of random
features).
Here we list some of the important limitations of supervised neural network based models.
- Need labeled data. All supervised learning methods, DNNs for supervised learning require labeled data. Often, labeled data is harder to acquire than unlabeled data (e.g. one must pay for human experts to label images).
- Supervised neural networks are extremely data intensive. DNNs are data hungry. They perform best when data is plentiful. This is doubly so for supervised methods where the data must also be labeled. The utility of DNNs is extremely limited if data is hard to acquire or the datasets are small (hundreds to a few thousand samples). In this case, the performance of other methods that utilize hand-engineered features can exceed that of DNNs.
- Homogeneous data. Almost all DNNs deal with homogeneous data of one type. It is very hard to design architectures that mix and match data types (i.e. some continuous variables, some discrete variables, some time series). In applications beyond images, video, and language, this is often what is required. In contrast, ensemble models like random forests or gradient-boosted trees have no difficulty handling mixed data types.
- Many problems are not about prediction. In natural science we are often interested in learning something about the underlying distribution that generates the data. In this case, it is often difficult to cast these ideas in a supervised learning setting. While the problems are related, it is possible to make good predictions with a wrong model. The model might or might not be useful for understanding the underlying science.
Some of these remarks are particular to DNNs, others are shared by all supervised learning methods. This motivates the use of unsupervised methods which in part circumvent these problems.