> True, but no one has made that argument.

Er, yes, I did, in my original post. The form you quoted was me attempting to be more precise in rephrasing it.

My point—my original point, this whole time—was that applying an advanced “feature extraction” algorithm to a data source whose features are explicitly encoded in a lossless, linearly-recoverable way in the data—what we usually call structured data—is silly.

For example, there’s no point in using ResNet50 to extract the “features” of a formal grammar, like JSON. It’d just be badly simulating a JSON parser.

In fact, there’s pretty much no data structure software engineers use, where ResNet50 would give you more information out than you’d get from just using the ADT interface of the data structure. What features are in a queue? Items and an ordering. What’s in a tree? Items, an ordering, and parent-child relationships. Etc.

The only place where it might make sense to use ML when dealing with structured data, is with statistical data structures like Bloom filters. ResNet50 might be able to recover some of the original data out of a bloom filter, in est using it as a compressed-sensing tool, or (in the algorithmic CS domain) as a decompressor for a lossy, underdetermined compression codec.

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My second point was that, often, it turns out that your data is structured data, even when you didn’t ask for structured data.

Some natural-world datasets are structured!

Example: the standard model of quantum chromodynamics describes a clean digraph of possible spin configurations. You don’t need feature detection when looking at LHC data. The dataset is pre-bucketed, the items pre-tagged, by nature itself.

But more often, what happens is that your data turns out to not be “raw” / primary-source data, but rather a secondary source that was already structured, enriched, and feature-extracted by someone else before you got there.

Scraping social network data? It’s already a graph, and it often already has annotation fields in the JSON graph endpoints describing the relationships between the members. If you don’t just stop and look at the dataset, you might think your feature-extractor is doing something very clever, when actually it’s just finding the explicit pre-chewed “relationship” field and spitting it back out at you.

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You might not see the relation to a kD-sample-matrix feature-extractor like ResNet50, so here’s some more tightly-analogous examples:

• What if the images in your training dataset turn out to be in Fireworks PNG format, where the raster data contains an embedding of the original vector image it was rendered from? Specializing your feature-extractor to this data is just going to make it learn to find those vectors (and extract features from those), rather than depending on the features in the raster data; and then it’ll fail on images without embedded vector descriptions. And if that’s all you want, why not just use a PNG parser to pull out the vectors?

• What if your audio files turn out to all have been MIDI files rendered out from a certain synthesizer using its default set of instrument patches? Will feature-extraction on this rendered data beat just writing a program to exact-match and decode the instruments back to a MIDI description? Certainly there might be MIDI-level features you want to extract, but will ResNet50 be better at extracting those MIDI-level features for having seen the rendering, as opposed to having been fed the decoded MIDI-level data directly?