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What is it with hacker news commenters and assuming other people don't know things? The comment I was responding to was talking about training sets, I riffed o
by jbooth 10y ago
What is it with hacker news commenters and assuming other people don't know things?
The comment I was responding to was talking about training sets, I riffed on that. Depending on your definition of "full explanatory power", the model itself might very well not be enough, especially in the case of neural networks. Could you take a set of weights in a 5-deep neural network, look at an input vector, and have any kind of intuition about the output? It could be that there's some really interesting research that I'm unaware of here, please let me know if there's something I'm missing.
You'll need additional descriptive statistics at the very least, combined with some stochastic meta-models to relate a given record to the "whys" of their output. It's doable without access to training sets, but convincing to us and convincing to a lawyer reading the letter of the law regarding "all inputs to the decision" are 2 different things.
- blahi 10y agoWhere ANNs make life-affecting decisions? I can't say with certainty there aren't companies doing it, but if there are just regulate them out and require transparent models. Speaking from experience, there is a massive shift away from ANNs in decision making. Companies (esp. in marketing) drank the Kool-Aid of some data scientists but figured out that they aren't all that useful. Turns out people care a lot more about inference and are willing to take a hit on prediction in order to be able to interact with the model. I'm not too familiar with ANNs but from the talks I've seen, I'm not even convinced they perform any better than other models. So from what I've seen, ANNs have very limited application area which does not overlap with decision making, so I don't think there is a problem with them. And if there is, just ban them in decision making. That's not being luddite. We ban all sort of technologies because they are not appropriate.
- jbooth 10y agoI'm not sure what the boundary is for "life-affecting", if you're talking about loan origination or anything, then like you said, there's already a boatload of regulations there. For marketing optimization, FWIW, my experience is the opposite. For a big enough application, any 0.5% improvement is hugely welcome, as long as it works reliably and you're not just gaming the metrics (or, to be honest, even if you are, yay corporate).
- blahi 10y agoAre you by any chance taking into consideration only adtech? Because there's much more to marketing than ads...