Tag: supervisedlearning

How 457 data scientists failed to predict life outcomes

How 457 data scientists failed to predict life outcomes

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:

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.

A visual representation of the data
via pnas.org/content/pnas/117/15/8398/F1.medium.gif

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.

Afbeelding
Via twitter.com/msalganik/status/1263886779603705856/photo/1

Here’s that same plot again, but from the original publication and with more detail:

Via pnas.org/content/117/15/8398

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.

Afbeelding
Via twitter.com/msalganik/status/1263886781449191424/photo/1

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.

@msalganik

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.

Survival of the Best Fit: A webgame on AI in recruitment

Survival of the Best Fit: A webgame on AI in recruitment

Survival of the Best Fit is a webgame that simulates what happens when companies automate their recruitment and selection processes.

You – playing as the CEO of a starting tech company – are asked to select your favorite candidates from a line-up, based on their resumés.

As your simulated company grows, the time pressure increases, and you are forced to automate the selection process.

Fortunately, some smart techies working for your company propose training a computer to hire just like you just did.

They don’t need anything but the data you just generated and some good old supervised machine learning!

To avoid spoilers, try the game yourself and see what happens!

The game only takes a few minutes, and is best played on mobile.

www.survivalofthebestfit.com/ via Medium

Survival of the Best Fit was built by Gabor Csapo, Jihyun Kim, Miha Klasinc, and Alia ElKattan. They are software engineers, designers and technologists, advocating for better software that allows members of the public to question its impact on society.

You don’t need to be an engineer to question how technology is affecting our lives. The goal is not for everyone to be a data scientist or machine learning engineer, though the field can certainly use more diversity, but to have enough awareness to join the conversation and ask important questions.

With Survival of the Best Fit, we want to reach an audience that may not be the makers of the very technology that impact them everyday. We want to help them better understand how AI works and how it may affect them, so that they can better demand transparency and accountability in systems that make more and more decisions for us.

survivalofthebestfit.com

I found that the game provides a great intuitive explanation of how (humas) bias can slip into A.I. or machine learning applications in recruitment, selection, or other human resource management practices and processes.

If you want to read more about people analytics and machine learning in HR, I wrote my dissertation on the topic and have many great books I strongly recommend.

Finally, here’s a nice Medium post about the game.

https://www.survivalofthebestfit.com/game/

Note, as Joachin replied below, that the game apparently does not learn from user-input, but is programmed to always result in bias towards blues.
I kind of hoped that there was actually an algorithm “learning” in the backend, and while the developers could argue that the bias arises from the added external training data (you picked either Google, Apple, or Amazon to learn from), it feels like a bit of a disappointment that there is no real interactivity here.

Data Science, Machine Learning, & Statistics resources (free courses, books, tutorials, & cheat sheets)

Data Science, Machine Learning, & Statistics resources (free courses, books, tutorials, & cheat sheets)

Welcome to my repository of data science, machine learning, and statistics resources. Software-specific material has to a large extent been listed under their respective overviews: R Resources & Python Resources. I also host a list of SQL Resources and datasets to practice programming. If you have any additions, please comment or contact me!

LAST UPDATED: 21-05-2018

Courses:

Video:

Books:

Sentiment Lexicons:

Cheatsheets:

Other:

Light GBM vs. XGBOOST in Python & R

XGBOOST stands for eXtreme Gradient Boosting. A big brother of the earlier AdaBoost, XGB is a supervised learning algorithm that uses an ensemble of adaptively boosted decision trees. For those unfamiliar with adaptive boosting algorithms, here’s a 2-minute explanation video and a written tutorial. Although XGBOOST often performs well in predictive tasks, the training process can be quite time-consuming (similar to other bagging/boosting algorithms (e.g., random forest)).

In a recent blog, Analytics Vidhya compares the inner workings as well as the predictive accuracy of the XGBOOST algorithm to an upcoming boosting algorithm: Light GBM. The blog demonstrates a stepwise implementation of both algorithms in Python. The table below reflects the main conclusion of the comparison: Although the algorithms are comparable in terms of their predictive performance, light GBM is much faster to train. With continuously increasing data volumes, light GBM, therefore, seems the way forward.

Laurae also benchmarked lightGBM against xgboost on a Bosch dataset and her results show that, on average, LightGBM (binning) is between 11x to 15x faster than xgboost (without binning):

View interactively online: https://plot.ly/~Laurae/9/

However, the differences get smaller as more threads are used due to thread inefficiencies (idle-time increases because threads are not scheduled a next task fast enough).

Light GBM is also available in R:

devtools::install_github("Microsoft/LightGBM", subdir = "R-package")

Neil Schneider tested the three algorithms for gradient boosting in R (GBM, xgboost, and lightGBM) and sums up their (dis)advantages:

  • GBM has no specific advantages but its disadvantages include no early stopping, slower training and decreased accuracy,
  • xgboost has demonstrated successful on kaggle and though traditionally slower than lightGBM, tree_method = 'hist' (histogram binning) provides a significant improvement.
  • lightGBM has the advantages of training efficiency, low memory usage, high accuracy, parallel learning, corporate support, and scale-ability. However, its’ newness is its main disadvantage because there is little community support.