SVMs, Kernels, Online Learning are pretty well understood. Neural networks are an abuse of the chain rule and makes your model dependent on a bunch of partial derivatives that you don&#x27;t necessarily understand why are important, but happen to be extremely effective when given lots of data. I think neural nets are probably what you&#x27;re referring to. If you understand the intuition about your problem, then you can reason about what those partial derivatives might represent. Except a lot of the time we don&#x27;t really have that level of understanding. What is your level of experience with machine learning? I&#x27;m a little surprised with your perception.