This blog highlights a recent PNAS paper in which 457 data scientists and academic scholars were challenged use machine learning to predict life outcomes using a rich dataset.
Yet, I can not summarize the result better than this tweet by the author of the paper:
If hundreds of scientists created predictive algorithms with high-quality data, how well would the best predict life outcomes? Not very well. Fragile Families Challenge: paper in PNAS w 112 authors https://t.co/WxDJbw0joz & Special Collection of Socius https://t.co/WM9f4oYaABpic.twitter.com/ZPFChD79VR
Over 750 scientific papers have used the Fragile Families dataset.
The dataset is famous for its richness of cohort (survey) data on the included families’ lives and their childrens’ upbringings. It includes a whopping 12.942 variables!!
Some of these variables reflect interesting life outcomes of the included families.
For instance, the childrens’ grade point averages (GPA) and grit, but also whether the family was ever evicted or experienced hardship, or whether their primary caregiver had received job training or was laid off at work.
You can read more about the exact data contents in the paper’s appendix.
Now Matthew and his co-authors shared this enormous dataset with over 160 teams consisting of 457 academics researchers and data scientists alike. Each of them well versed in statistics and predictive modelling.
These data scientists were challenged with this task: by all means possible, make the most predictive model for the six life outcomes (i.e., GPA, conviction, etc).
The scientists could use all the Fragile Families data, and any algorithm they liked, and their final model and its predictions would be compared against the actual life outcomes in a holdout sample.
According to the paper, many of these teams used machine-learning methods that are not typically used in social science research and that explicitly seek to maximize predictive accuracy.
Now, here’s the summary again:
If hundreds of [data] scientists created predictive algorithms with high-quality data, how well would the best predict life outcomes?
Not very well.
@msalganik
Even the best among the 160 teams’ predictions showed disappointing resemblance of the actual life outcomes. None of the trained models/algorithms achieved an R-squared of over 0.25.
Wondering what these best R-squared of around 0.20 look like? Here’s the disappointg reality of plot C enlarged: the actual TRUE GPA’s on the x-axis, plotted against the best team’s predicted GPA’s on the y-axis.
Sure, there’s some relationship, with higher actual scores getting higher (average) predictions. But it ain’t much.
Moreover, there’s very little variation in the predictions. They all clump together between the range of about 2.1 and 3.8… that’s not really setting apart the geniuses from the less bright!
Matthew sums up the implications quite nicely in one of his tweets:
For policymakers deploying predictive algorithms in high-stakes decisions, our result is a reminder of a basic fact: one should not assume that algorithms predict well. That must be demonstrated with transparent, empirical evidence.
According to Matthew this “collective failure of 160 teams” is hard to ignore. And it failure highlights the understanding vs. predicting paradox: these data have been used to generate knowledge on how the world works in over 750 papers, yet few checked to see whether these same data and the scientific models would be useful to predict the life outcomes we’re trying to understand.
I was super excited to read this paper and I love the approach. It is actually quite closely linked to a series of papers I have been working on with Brian Spisak and Brian Doornenbal on trying to predict which people will emerge as organizational leaders. (hint: we could not really, at least not based on their personality)
Apparently, others were as excited as I am about this paper, as Filiz Garip already published a commentary paper on this research piece. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall so I haven’t read it yet.
Moreover, if you want to learn more about the approaches the 160 data science teams took in modelling these life outcomes, here are twelve papers in which some teams share their attempts.
Very curious to hear what you think of the paper and its implications. You can access it here, and I’d love to read your comments below.
Google Brain researchers published this amazing paper, with accompanying GIF where they show the true power of AutoML.
AutoML stands for automated machine learning, and basically refers to an algorithm autonomously building the best machine learning model for a given problem.
This task of selecting the best ML model is difficult as it is. There are many different ML algorithms to choose from, and each of these has many different settings ([hyper]parameters) you can change to optimalize the model’s predictions.
For instance, let’s look at one specific ML algorithm: the neural network. Not only can we try out millions of different neural network architectures (ways in which the nodes and lyers of a network are connected), but each of these we can test with different loss functions, learning rates, dropout rates, et cetera. And this is only one algorithm!
In their new paper, the Google Brain scholars display how they managed to automatically discover complete machine learning algorithms just using basic mathematical operations as building blocks. Using evolutionary principles, they have developed an AutoML framework that tailors its own algorithms and architectures to best fit the data and problem at hand.
This is AI research at its finest, and the results are truly remarkable!
Both in science and business, we often experience difficulties collecting enough data to test our hypotheses, either because target groups are small or hard to access, or because data collection entails prohibitive costs.
Such obstacles may result in data sets that are too small for the complexity of the statistical model needed to answer the questions we’re really interested in.
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I came across this opinionated though informed commentary by Vinay Prasad on the recent Nature article where Google’s machine learning experts trained models to predict whether scans of patients’ breasts (mammogram’s) show cancerous cells or not.
Vinay Prasad [official bio] is a practicing hematologist-oncologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. So he knows what he’s talking about.
He argues that “cancer screening is the LAST thing you should pick FIRST to work on with AI”. Which is an interesting statement in and of itself.
Regardless of my personal opinion on the topic, I found the paper, Vinay’s commentary, and the broader discussion on twitter very interesting and educational to read. I feel it shows how important it is to know the context in which you are applying machine learning. What tremendous value it provides to have domain experts in the same team as the data and machine learning experts.
Reddit is a treasure trove of random stuff. However, every now and then, in the better groups, quite valuable topics pop up. Here’s one I came across on r/statistics:
Particularly the advice by grandzooby seemed worth a like, and he linked to several useful resources which I’ve summarized for you below.
An 11-step guide to reading a paper
Jennifer Raff — assistant professor at the University of Kansas — wrote this 3-page guide on how to read papers. It elaborates on 11 main pieces of advice for reading academic papers:
Begin by reading the introduction, skip the abstract.
Identify the general problem: “What problem is this research field trying to solve?”
Try to uncover the reason and need for this specific study.
Identify the specific problem: “What problems is this paper trying to solve?”
Identify what the researchers are going to do to solve that problem
Read & identify the methods: draw the studies in diagrams
Read & identify the results: write down the main findings
Determine whether the results solve the specific problem
Read the conclusions and determine whether you agree
Mary Purugganan and Jan Hewitt of Rice University propose slightly different steps for reading academic papers. Though they seem more general pointers to keep in mind to me:
Skim the article and identify its structure
Distinguish its main points
Generate questions before and during reading
Draw inferences while reading
Take notes while reading
Regarding the note taking Mary and Jan propose the following template which may proof useful:
Citation:
URL:
Keywords:
General subject:
Specific subject:
Hypotheses:
Methodology:
Results:
Key points:
Context (in the broader field/your work):
Significance (to the field/your work):
Important figures/tables (description/page numbers):
References for further reading:
Other comments:
Scholars sharing their experiences
Science Magazine dedicated a long read to how to seriously read scientific papers, in which they asked multiple scholars to share their experiences and tips.
Anatomy of a scientific paper
This 13-page guide by the American Society of Plant Biologists was recommended by some, but I personally don’t find it as useful as the other advices here. Nevertheless, for the laymen, it does include a nice visualization of the anatomy of scientific papers:
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