title: How to do machine learning when the inputs are of different sizes?
body: <p>In standard cookbook machine learning, we operate on a rectangular matrix; that is, all of our data points have the same number of features. How do we cope with situations in which all of our data points have different numbers of features? For example, if we want to do visual classification but all of our pictures are of different dimensions, or if we want to do sentiment analysis but all of our sentences have different amounts of words, or if we want to do stellar classification but all of the stars have been observed a different number of times, etc.</p>
  
  <p>I think the normal way would be to extract features of regular size from these irregularly sized data. But I attended a talk on deep learning recently where the speaker emphasized that instead of hand-crafting features from data, deep learners are able to learn the appropriate features themselves. But how do we use e.g. a neural network if the input layer is not of a fixed size?</p>