When I was fresh out of uni, I got asked to build a system to show recommendations to people based on a graph of connections between them. I tried to mentally think about these as a network of resistors, which led me to dimensionality reduction and from there to alternating least squares. Isomorphisms are fun like that: they can help you find techniques when you're stuck on something.
Yep! My problem at the time was that I didn't know I needed a matrix, or which operations would be helpful to perform on one, because I didn't know much about the problem I was trying to solve. I ran into a paper about using SVD on networks of resistors to simplify them, which pointed me in the right direction.
When I was fresh out of uni, I got asked to build a system to show recommendations to people based on a graph of connections between them. I tried to mentally think about these as a network of resistors, which led me to dimensionality reduction and from there to alternating least squares. Isomorphisms are fun like that: they can help you find techniques when you're stuck on something.