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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3217 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Thoughtcrime comes to Fresno

The "secret sauce" of machine learning algorithms is almost always "shit that makes no sense, but makes it perform well on our testing set."

That said, I can buy such an algorithm being good at making the predictions it makes. Give it as a project to a machine learning class and I bet most everyone would come up with something that works pretty well. I don't buy anyone doing it I'm-willing-to-let-it-advise-the-cops-to-kick-someone's-door-down well though.





kleinbl00  ·  3217 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'll bet that's it exactly. And that's exactly the issue: the decisions the algorithm makes need to be human-parseable in order for anyone to have any confidence in the issue and human-parseable machine learning is an oxymoron.

user-inactivated  ·  3217 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That's not entirely true; you can usually at least mention what features were most significant, like a credit report does.