December 15, 2017

Briefly

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  • From the LA Times, week before last The Los Angeles Police Department asked drivers to avoid navigation apps, which are steering users onto more open routes — in this case, streets in the neighborhoods that are on fire.  A related XKCD
  • From a Twitter thread about machine learning in the law (via Alex Hayes): For example, in crime prediction, X is not a sample from the population but instead from the subset of the population investigated by the police. Y is not the true outcome (e.g., did the person commit a crime), but the conclusion of the legal system. So a model predicting Y from X is predicting how the legal system will treat a person X that they have chosen to investigate. It is not predicting whether a person X’ drawn from the general population is guilty (Y’).  He’s not saying this is impossible to fix, but it won’t fix itself.
  • Wil Undy, who did the Herald’s poll aggregator in the NZ election, now has a blog.
  • A fascinating newly-discovered optical illusion
  • Interactive map of debt in the USA (via Alberto Cairo)
  • Thinking about ethics of machine-learning experiments such as determining sexual orientation from face images.
  • The Washington Post has exit polls for the Alabama senate election, including graphs.  I think it would be helpful to  show the size of different groups, not just how they voted

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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 »