8 ms·

I mean, if you already have the medical knowledge and you want to automate things, wouldn’t codifying it into an expert system (fancy words for a bunch of if-el

by brap 4y ago

I mean, if you already have the medical knowledge and you want to automate things, wouldn’t codifying it into an expert system (fancy words for a bunch of if-else’s) make more sense than feeding examples to an ML classifier? Obviously easier said than done, but in the case of medicine, I think we pretty much know why we make the decisions we do (vs for example face recognition or text generation). Also, high confidence in the predictions and explainability are much more important in medicine.

marcosdumay 4y ago
> but in the case of medicine, I think we pretty much know why we make the decisions we do Why know why we do many of them, but not all. I'd guess not even most. Image diagnostics, lab analysis, there are plenty of areas where doctors make fuzzy decisions based on a lot of intuition. Logic classifiers (a superclass of expert systems) are good for when we know why we decide stuff. ML is good for when we don't. And yes, once we have some AI that do stuff well but don't know why, the next obvious step is to reverse engineer it.