3 ms·

A lot of machine learning people don't really understand study design or power or things like that. It's gotten a little better over the past decade or so, but

• mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I disagree. Machine learning education almost always involves a lot of focus on design of experiments, causal inference, A/B testing and related topics. I could agree with your claim if you meant bootcamp programs or data science sorts of coursework, but machine learning is generally grounded in both measure theoretic probability theory and a robust understanding of applied statistics before moving on. After that will be the basics of pattern classification, clustering, regression and dimensionality reduction. Last of all will be very domain-specific tools for NLP, computer vision, audio processing involving e.g. deep neural networks.
• Camillo 7y ago
  "A lot" of ML people perhaps, but also the overwhelming majority of clinical scientists and the near totality of doctors.
  • braindeath 7y ago
    There are plenty of academic and academic center trained physicians that understand study design and are competent in research. They aren’t typically primary care/general practitioners so you just don’t encounter them as much. And yes they are the minority. But it’s not the totality. Clinical research that isn’t making ridiculous claims tends to get much less press. Furthermore, of all places to lap that crap up... this hacker news site is frankly one of the worst. I mean look at this submission. Yes it’s true people are pillorying it here (including some doctors), but i don’t recall much interesting well designed medical research being discussed here (though arguably maybe not the place for it)