Yeah AI world have a loose definition of explanability and interpretablity.
I also see this very dogmatic mindset that Deep Learning will do prediction and interpretability.
What is stopping you from building two models? a regression statistic model to do interpretability/explanability and another deep learning for prediction?
Like each coefficient in a regression have a t-test for significant in correlation with response. You don't have something like that in deep learning. Also I've seen many MLer use logistic regression as a classifier and ignoring the probability aspect like the Titanic dataset highlight the different mindset between statistician and ML. ML often will see this as a classify problem dead or not dead. Statistician will phrase to "What's the probability of this person dying with these covariates?"
You know why this matter? It really matter in health/medical/social science. Often time inference is what they want and they need to know what affect your health not just shoving in tons of data and covariates/features. Not only that you many not even have enough data for these data hungry ML models.
Another example is biostatistician figure out threshold between the benefit of taking an invasive procedure versus not taking it. We figure it out but giving a percentage and the doctor and experts will tell you where the threshold is, 20%, 40%? It's certainly not 50% that many MLer do.
> We often hear that AI systems must provide explanations and establish causal relationships, particularly for life-critical applications.
Yes, that can be useful. Or at least reassuring.
To me this just an excuse to not learn statistic. He should really look into Propensity modeling under Rubin-Neymer causality model. This is what statistic is going into after regression for observational data.
With all the criticism I have for ML. I think it's just the mind set. I think the ML algorithms have a place and they're very good in certain domain such as NLP and computer vision. But to act as if they're the end all be all when statistic models have been there and use extensive in biostatistic and econometric fields is just hubris and ignorance.
While ML is making excuses for causality. Econometric and statistician are working to build causality model. IIRC econometric is doing structure equation while statistician are going for Rubin-Neyman model. There is debate on which model is better but that's ongoing we'll wait and see from all the research papers.
I also see this very dogmatic mindset that Deep Learning will do prediction and interpretability.
What is stopping you from building two models? a regression statistic model to do interpretability/explanability and another deep learning for prediction?
Like each coefficient in a regression have a t-test for significant in correlation with response. You don't have something like that in deep learning. Also I've seen many MLer use logistic regression as a classifier and ignoring the probability aspect like the Titanic dataset highlight the different mindset between statistician and ML. ML often will see this as a classify problem dead or not dead. Statistician will phrase to "What's the probability of this person dying with these covariates?"
You know why this matter? It really matter in health/medical/social science. Often time inference is what they want and they need to know what affect your health not just shoving in tons of data and covariates/features. Not only that you many not even have enough data for these data hungry ML models.
Another example is biostatistician figure out threshold between the benefit of taking an invasive procedure versus not taking it. We figure it out but giving a percentage and the doctor and experts will tell you where the threshold is, 20%, 40%? It's certainly not 50% that many MLer do.
> We often hear that AI systems must provide explanations and establish causal relationships, particularly for life-critical applications. Yes, that can be useful. Or at least reassuring.
To me this just an excuse to not learn statistic. He should really look into Propensity modeling under Rubin-Neymer causality model. This is what statistic is going into after regression for observational data.
With all the criticism I have for ML. I think it's just the mind set. I think the ML algorithms have a place and they're very good in certain domain such as NLP and computer vision. But to act as if they're the end all be all when statistic models have been there and use extensive in biostatistic and econometric fields is just hubris and ignorance.
While ML is making excuses for causality. Econometric and statistician are working to build causality model. IIRC econometric is doing structure equation while statistician are going for Rubin-Neyman model. There is debate on which model is better but that's ongoing we'll wait and see from all the research papers.