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> Simple linear models generally outperform experts At what? At correctly diagnosing patients or predicting prognosis once an issue has already been identified
by phailhaus 5y ago
> Simple linear models generally outperform experts
At what? At correctly diagnosing patients or predicting prognosis once an issue has already been identified, as in Meehl's paper? That is not the same thing as determining whether a patient has the "mental capacity" to commit suicide.
- kqr 5y agoAt correctly diagnosing patients, too -- at least for some ailments. The common objection against this evidence is "sure, it happened to work there, but it won't work in this case!" And of course, it's very hard to defend this research against an accusation like that. However, it's been a remarkable stable result whenever it is tried for a new task, so I guess what I'm saying is that I like to stay open to simple algorithms making better decisions than humans. Not because the algorithms are good (linear models with random weights are not very good) but because humans are incredibly fallible.