October 9, 2015

Predictive analytics and the rise of the machines

Some cautionary tales

  • “I would like to challenge this picture, and ask you to imagine data not as a pristine resource, but as a waste product, a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.” A talk by Maciej Ceglowski
  • How do you measure whether automated decision making ends up discriminating by race, when it doesn’t explicitly use race as an input? Two posts by Cathy O’Neil
  • A computer program that was accidentally trained to discriminate by gender and ethnicity
  • Why modern predictive analytics doesn’t give ‘algorithms’ in the sense of ‘recipes’, by Suresh Venkat (via @ndiakopoulos)
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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »