The Power of Latent Variable Models

Looking beyond the data surface

Manuel Brenner
Towards Data Science
8 min readDec 29, 2020

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“Look beneath the surface; let not the several quality of a thing nor its worth escape thee.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Photo by Etienne Pauthenet on Unsplash

Science firmly rests on the power of observation. Models triumph or fall after they are compared to observations in the real world.

But in more sophisticated models, something very complicated can happen beyond the surface of what is actually being observed, and it is not always clear how to relate the limited scope of the observables available to our limited human faculties to complex underlying processes.

String theory is a prime example where extremely intricate physics are assumed to be hidden behind the trees and birds and people of our phenomenological universe. The field of string phenomenology is concerned with mapping the physics arising from the vibrational patterns of strings onto physical processes (such as new particles) we can actually observe, but this is a challenging enterprise. Even though the scope of what we can observe has greatly expanded through inventions such as microscopes, telescopes, particle colliders, and gravitational wave detectors, strings are far too tiny to be directly observed. And so the string theory community has long been struggling with accusations of unfalsifiability: if a scientific…

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