July 24, 2018
Briefly
- “More than 4,100 Illinois children were assigned a 90 percent or greater probability of death or injury, according to internal DCFS child-tracking data released to the Tribune under state public records laws.” A data-mining program designed to predict child abuse wasn’t very good.
- Dropbox gave out (‘anonymised’) data to researchers studying collaboration — their current terms of service allow this, but the terms of service from 2015, the start of the data, didn’t.
- From the Creepy and possibly Evil department: a Pro Publica/NPR report on use of non-traditional data sources (social media, shopping, TV-watching) by health insurers.
- “Clinicians order portable x-rays because a patient is too sick to get out of bed. This practice is consistent across hospitals. The example images above suggest that CNNs may be able to learn to identify patients who received portable x-rays and assign higher rates of disease to them. Identifying portable x-rays as more likely to contain pneumonia, therefore, would likely generalize across hospitals. The portable x-ray, however, is not the cause of pneumonia.” A post on difficulties in teaching machines to read chest x-rays.
- Tim Dare, an ethicist from the University of Auckland, gave his Professorial Inaugural Lecture on transparency in computer algorithms. Here’s a post at Newsroom.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »