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This has been my experience as well. My intuition is that complex models have several pitfalls that undermine their practical value: 1) complex models make mor
by pbronez 6y ago
This has been my experience as well. My intuition is that complex models have several pitfalls that undermine their practical value:
1) complex models make more assumptions and may be less robust to the world behaving in unexpected ways. It takes more effort for practitioners to thoroughly review all these assumptions.
2) complex models have more parameters, and thus require more data to train. This limits the scenarios where they can be deployed
3) complex models are harder to interpret, which makes them less useful for convincing people to take action AND increase the likelihood that a practitioner will make an interpretation error
Of course, complex models have plenty of advantages too. Under-specified models can be wrong just by failing to account for obvious, well-documented variations. Human judgement is required to select the appropriate model for a given situation.