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An Algorithm That Can Predict Human Behavior Better Than Humans (mit.edu)
Quartz describes an MIT study with the surprising conclusion that at least in some circumstances, an algorithm can not only sift numbers faster than humans (after all, that's what computers are best at), but also discern relevant factors within a complex data set more accurately and more quickly than can teams of humans. In a competition involving 905 human teams, a system called the Data Science Machine, designed by MIT master's student Max Kanter and his advisor, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, beat most of the humans for accuracy and speed in three tests of predictive power, including one about "whether a student would drop out during the next ten days, based on student interactions with resources on an online course."
Teams might have looked at how late students turned in their problem sets, or whether they spent any time looking at lecture notes. But instead, MIT News reports, the two most important indicators turned out to be how far ahead of a deadline the student began working on their problem set, and how much time the student spent on the course website. ...
The Data Science Machine performed well in this competition. It was also successful in two other competitions, one in which participants had to predict whether a crowd-funded project would be considered “exciting” and another if a customer would become a repeat buyer.
Yeah, pretty much. Computer sorts through a massive data set, compiled and fed to it in a convenient format by... humans.
I would be more impressed if they gave the computer eyes and it scanned people walking around and was able to spot some behavior that humans missed. But of course machine vision being what it is currently, computer might not even be able to tell a human apart from a squirrel.
it's just what seems rather simple data analysis.
I don't get it though how it would get the answer better than a human who should be using the same resources anyways, that is, using something like this as a resource.
not sure what good it does for them to know if someone is dropping out of an online course or not though, like, I suppose it just checks if someone has advanced in the course in the past 3-7 days at all
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If it worked so well as the headline claimed then they wouldn't be writing articles about it, but using it to buy/sell stocks and options. ;-)
New things are always on the horizon