I do research in computer vision and this paper is so bad it's beyond words. * They give the network is huge advantage: they teach it that it should say "no" 80% of the time. The training data is unbalanced (80% no vs 20% yes) as is the test data. Of course it does well! I don't care what they do at training time, but the test data should be balanced or they should correct for this in the analysis. * They measure the…
Since this is a journal focused on cancer and not machine learning, I can understand why the editors would see this paper as being worthy for for publication. Unfortunately, many of the readers will read the paper uncritically. If possible, you should write a critical response to this paper, focusing on its methodological flaws, and send it to the editors. It doesn't have to be long; critical response are usually a c…
If the authors actually wanted to do good ML research, they could always have reached out to a decent ML researcher who could have told them all of this. There's no shortage of us. The journal could have reached out to an ML reviewer. Why wouldn't they? But no one did, because the results look good and so they send it off to press and it's good for both the authors and the journal to have something that is hype-worthy. It's just the sad reality of modern science.