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Can we guess your age and income, based solely on the apps on your phone?

washingtonpost.com

61–70 of 93 posts

Re: Can we guess your age and income, based solely on the apps on your phone?

#61
post #49

They need a box for "I've never even heard of this app" that would allow them to better predict I'm an old curmudgeon who is just fine with missing out on the latest trends. Instead I'm a twenty-something single woman making more than $52k.

>They need a box for "I've never even heard of this app"

I would answer that for more than 80% of questions. Not sure how would that help.

Re: Can we guess your age and income, based solely on the apps on your phone?

#65
post #49

They need a box for "I've never even heard of this app" that would allow them to better predict I'm an old curmudgeon who is just fine with missing out on the latest trends. Instead I'm a twenty-something single woman making more than $52k.

'Never heard of this app' isn't actually discernable form the list of installed apps on your phone, which is at the core of the point they're making.

Re: Can we guess your age and income, based solely on the apps on your phone?

#66

"You are a married lady older than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year You're either a married, middle-aged lady ... or you use your phone like one." I am a male (strike 1), 50+ (strike 2), Side business takes in more than $52k (strike 3). I am married (Zillow for Mrs. Mar) and have 2 teen aged daughters (Instagram to follow them). I'll give machine learning another decade /s.

I see no evidence that they used machine learning. If they had, this thread might be less full of people saying it did worse than random.

From the paper linked in TFA, scikit-learn's logistic regression model (a poorly named one, since it's used for classification rather than regression) is used as the classification model. Like with most machine learning endeavors, I've found that Johnny Five said it best: "More input!"

Re: Can we guess your age and income, based solely on the apps on your phone?

#70

Got me 100% right, which is weird because I figured the lack of apps on my phone would be a problem (I have a windows phone so there's a lot missing). Sounds like it wasn't too accurate for the rest of you though.

Strange. I thought it would be bad for me due to lack of apps (personal choice) too and the only thing it got wrong was age - and even that was pretty close.
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