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Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

methodsman.com

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Re: Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

#61
post #57
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the last part of this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15598117 Can you provide pseudocode consistent with what they described (in the post you responding to) that wouldn't lead to leakage? I can't see it.

Select a training set, leaving out one sample for validation. For all features, train a classifier on the training set using that feature. Keep the one that gives the highest discrimination score on the training set. Repeat with more features. Then evaluate the final classifier on the validation sample, which has so far not been seen in any of the steps. The result provides an estimate of the risk on unseen data from…

>"when you want to classify a new sample, you take a model trained on the complete labeled data you have and use the prediction of that."

Using which set of features? You have 34 different models with different features...

Re: Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

#62
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suicide is definitely linked to gun availability. "A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50 U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides. Based on a survey of American households conducted in 2002, HSPH Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management Matthew Miller, Research Associate Deborah Azrael, and colleagues at the School’s Injury Control Research Cent…

Gun ownership in the U.S. is strongly correlated with socio-economic status, locality, etc. Everybody points to the Australian example, where suicides declined after the 1996 gun control legislation. But unemployment in Australia peaked in 1995 and declined precipitously afterward until 2009. Given everything we know about suicide rates in other countries, and about changes in suicide rates domestically (e.g. recent…

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/

Tl;dr?

* Many suicide attempts occur with little planning during a short-term crisis.

* Intent isn’t all that determines whether an attempter lives or dies; means also matter.

* 90% of attempters who survive do NOT go on to die by suicide later.

* Access to firearms is a risk factor for suicide.

* Firearms used in youth suicide usually belong to a parent.

* Reducing access to lethal means saves lives.

Re: Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

17 subjects per group is extremely small. Looking at it either from a machine learning or statistical point of view, using such a small sample is problematic. This is the chronic issue with fMRI studies, since administering an fMRI is extremely expensive, and has led to some very difficult to reproduce results in the field.

People love the "n=XX is far too little data!" argument, yet it's more complicated than that. Sometimes 600,000 is too little, yet sometimes 17 is enough. Example: you believe a newly found plant species is toxic. You give it to 17 "grad students volunteers", while giving a placebo to 17 others. All in the first group die aa gruesome death within 20 hours. None of the others do. Result: yes significance. (also: tenur…

I really hope you wouldn't get tenure for a study that killed all your subjects.

Re: Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love the "n=XX is far too little data!" argument, yet it's more complicated than that. Sometimes 600,000 is too little, yet sometimes 17 is enough. Example: you believe a newly found plant species is toxic. You give it to 17 "grad students volunteers", while giving a placebo to 17 others. All in the first group die aa gruesome death within 20 hours. None of the others do. Result: yes significance. (also: tenur…

I really hope you wouldn't get tenure for a study that killed all your subjects.

Subjects? But they're volunteer grad students!

Re: Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"On each fold, the trained classifier was tested on the data of the left-out participant. This procedure was reiterated for all 34 possible ways of leaving out one participant, yielding 34 classifications whose averaged accuracies are reported." Sounds like they overfit their cross validation score and reported that. The data is actually available here though: http://www.ccbi.cmu.edu/Suicidal-ideation-NATHUMBEH2017/

LOOCV can have high variance, but overfitting?

I was thinking they might have "overfit" by picking hyper-parameters that happened by chance to result in a high CV score but wouldn't perform well in a holdout set. I could be wrong though, that's just my intuition.

Re: Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

17 subjects per group is extremely small. Looking at it either from a machine learning or statistical point of view, using such a small sample is problematic. This is the chronic issue with fMRI studies, since administering an fMRI is extremely expensive, and has led to some very difficult to reproduce results in the field.

People love the "n=XX is far too little data!" argument, yet it's more complicated than that. Sometimes 600,000 is too little, yet sometimes 17 is enough. Example: you believe a newly found plant species is toxic. You give it to 17 "grad students volunteers", while giving a placebo to 17 others. All in the first group die aa gruesome death within 20 hours. None of the others do. Result: yes significance. (also: tenur…

The technical term for that is "effect size".

Re: Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

#67
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simplest answer is that every single data point was used in some part of the training, and then later used to give test validation. We have no idea how this result would work on a new data point that has not been used in training. It's bad statistics, bad data science.

Multi-fold cross validation is an established technique. At no point is any data that was used to train a model also used to validate it. > One round of cross-validation involves partitioning a sample of data into complementary subsets, performing the analysis on one subset (called the training set), and validating the analysis on the other subset (called the validation set or testing set). To reduce variability, mul…

[deleted]

Re: Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

#68
post #34

Doesn't 91% seem far too low to be useful for the general population? Consider that only 7% of the background population experiences one or more depressive episode per year[0] (edit: okay maybe 8% in youth). Assuming independence and using the higher 8% background rate figure for youth, .91 * .08 = 7.3% of the population will receive a true positive result and (1-.91) * (1-.08) = 8.3% of the population will receive a…

Isn't the point of research to advance science one step at a time, not go from "does this look promising" to "yes, it works perfectly 100% of the time" in a single quantum leap.

Re: Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

#69
post #61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Select a training set, leaving out one sample for validation. For all features, train a classifier on the training set using that feature. Keep the one that gives the highest discrimination score on the training set. Repeat with more features. Then evaluate the final classifier on the validation sample, which has so far not been seen in any of the steps. The result provides an estimate of the risk on unseen data from…

>"when you want to classify a new sample, you take a model trained on the complete labeled data you have and use the prediction of that." Using which set of features? You have 34 different models with different features...

You run the whole training process on the complete data. Including feature selection.

Re: Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

#70
post #69
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"when you want to classify a new sample, you take a model trained on the complete labeled data you have and use the prediction of that." Using which set of features? You have 34 different models with different features...

You run the whole training process on the complete data. Including feature selection.

I see. So usually what you would do is run the CV a bunch of times to test various features/hyperparameters, knowing this will overfit to the data used for the cv.

After deciding on features/hyperparameters (based on the overfit cv), you train the model on all the data used for cv at once. Then test the resulting model on a holdout set (that was not used for the cv). The accuracy on that holdout would then be the accuracy to report.

This sounds much like what you are describing, except you only do one cv and do not use it to decide anything. The cv is only to give an estimate of accuracy.

Is that correct? It does seem to legitimately avoid leakage. However, it seems impossible that an anything close to optimal feature generation process or the hyperparameters were known beforehand. Do you just use defaults here?

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