Live data from Hacker News

AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest

scientificamerican.com

11–20 of 162 posts

Re: AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest

#11
post #7

As someone who works in healthcare, so much of what I read about AI makes me think that the people who are enthusiastic about healthcare AI don't have much experience doing it. The scenarios rarely seem to fit with what I'm actually practicing. Most of medicine is boring, it is largely routine, and if we don't know what's going on, it's because we're not the right person to be managing the patient. Most of my time is…

[deleted]

Re: AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest

#12
My humble opinion; AI is supposed to be the acronym for artificial intelligence, but marketing has usurped it to refer to machine learning, which is nothing more than a neo-language for defining statistical equations in a semi-automated way. An attempt to dispense with mathematicians to develop models.

What amount of energy is necessary for an event to be reflected in a statistic? You have a box of 2x2 meters with balls of data, and a string with a diameter of 1 meter with which to surround the highest concentration of balls possible, and those that remain outside, there they stay. Statistics and lack of precision are concepts that go hand in hand (someones say even it is not an science).

Re: AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest

#13
post #9
post #7

As someone who works in healthcare, so much of what I read about AI makes me think that the people who are enthusiastic about healthcare AI don't have much experience doing it. The scenarios rarely seem to fit with what I'm actually practicing. Most of medicine is boring, it is largely routine, and if we don't know what's going on, it's because we're not the right person to be managing the patient. Most of my time is…

That scenario sounds like it lends itself more to AI automation than a Dr. House type one.

I don't know, compassion and understanding and nuanced understanding of individual desires when talking to someone is not what I associate AI with in my mind, but being able to assess sociological and cultural taboos and try to what a patient actually wants rather then what they might initially express seems like something I good doctor would get to through explorative conversation.

Re: AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest

#14
post #12

My humble opinion; AI is supposed to be the acronym for artificial intelligence, but marketing has usurped it to refer to machine learning, which is nothing more than a neo-language for defining statistical equations in a semi-automated way. An attempt to dispense with mathematicians to develop models. What amount of energy is necessary for an event to be reflected in a statistic? You have a box of 2x2 meters with ba…

Having built models, I’d claim that it’s art based upon science, perhaps not too different than engineering a building. At every stage there are decisions to be made with tradeoffs. Over time, the resulting model could be invalidated or perhaps perform better. It’s remarkably difficult to approach or even define a “best” model.

What’s most peculiar to me is that somehow AI is becoming more distinct from math or stats and that there’s a notion by running pytorch one is able to play god and create sentience.

Re: AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest

#15
This is entirely unsurprising and has a very simple solution: keep adding more data. Our measurements of the accuracy of AI systems are only as good as the test data, and if the test data is too small, then the reported accuracies won't reflect the true accuracies of the model applied to wild data.

Basically, we need an accurate measure of whether the test data set is statistically representative of wild data. In healthcare, this means that the individuals that make of the test dataset must be statistically representative of the actual population (and also have enough samples).

An easy solution here is that any research that doesn't pass a population statistics test must be up-front declared to be "not representative of real word usage" or something.

Re: AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest

#16

I recently published a paper, where we explain how an FDA approved prediction model, build into a widely used cardiac monitor was developed with an incredibly biased method. https://doi.org/10.1097/ALN.0000000000004320 Basically, the training and validation data was engineered so an important range for one of the predictor variables was only present in one of the outcomes, making perfect prediction possible for these…

Sorry for asking, but how is this relevant to the article?

Re: AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest

#17
post #15

This is entirely unsurprising and has a very simple solution: keep adding more data. Our measurements of the accuracy of AI systems are only as good as the test data, and if the test data is too small, then the reported accuracies won't reflect the true accuracies of the model applied to wild data. Basically, we need an accurate measure of whether the test data set is statistically representative of wild data. In hea…

From the article:

> Here’s why: As researchers feed data into AI models, the models are expected to become more accurate, or at least not get worse. However, our work and the work of others has identified the opposite, where the reported accuracy in published models decreases with increasing data set size.

Re: AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest

#18
post #16

I recently published a paper, where we explain how an FDA approved prediction model, build into a widely used cardiac monitor was developed with an incredibly biased method. https://doi.org/10.1097/ALN.0000000000004320 Basically, the training and validation data was engineered so an important range for one of the predictor variables was only present in one of the outcomes, making perfect prediction possible for these…

Sorry for asking, but how is this relevant to the article?

Sorry for asking, but how is it not?

Re: AI models that predict disease are not as accurate as reports might suggest

#19
The solution to failures of AI in heathcare is transparency of data. OpenAI's models work because they have virtually unlimited data to train on. The scale of training data for doctor bots is one millionth the size. Different countries, organizations, universities need to be as open as possible sharing and collaborating, realizing improvements in medicine benefits all of humanity with almost no downsides.
Post reply on HN