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Artificial Intelligence Can Now Predict Suicide With Remarkable Accuracy (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Colin Walsh, data scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and his colleagues have created machine-learning algorithms that predict, with unnerving accuracy, the likelihood that a patient will attempt suicide. In trials, results have been 80-90% accurate when predicting whether someone will attempt suicide within the next two years, and 92% accurate in predicting whether someone will attempt suicide within the next week. The prediction is based on data that's widely available from all hospital admissions, including age, gender, zip codes, medications, and prior diagnoses. Walsh and his team gathered data on 5,167 patients from Vanderbilt University Medical Center that had been admitted with signs of self-harm or suicidal ideation. They read each of these cases to identify the 3,250 instances of suicide attempts. This set of more than 5,000 cases was used to train the machine to identify those at risk of attempted suicide compared to those who committed self-harm but showed no evidence of suicidal intent.
not artificial intelligence.
Give people a reason to not kill themselves and you'll see rates drop.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
your are correct, these morons used a group of suicidal patients for their case study and now are claiming great success.
Distopian prediction: Life insurance payout denied. Despite a clean tox screen, your relative was suicidal (according to our algorithm) and was intentionally driving at a time of night when she knew a lot of drunk drivers would be on the road.
Simple accuracy percentages are misleading when applied to low-probability events. An "AI" that always returned "No" to the query "Will this person commit suicide within the next two years?" would be 97.2% accurate (and 99.975% accurate for the next-week variant). And yet, that "AI" would be absolutely useless for any practical purpose.
Not to mention, with suicides, access to means has been a better statistical predictor than anything else, even mental illness. A person with no personal or family history of mental illness, but with a gun and a gas oven in their house, is at higher risk of killing themselves than a bipolar alcoholic with neither.
We MUST have a NUCLEAR WAR with RUSSIA!!!!!@!@!!
Pay no attention to the failures with the decrepit ideology behind the curtain!
It's probably mostly meaningless. I mean, they scanned for features of people who are suicidal. They were in the hospital because they inflicted self harm, and were on medications specifically prescribed to make people not do that. So as far as I can tell, this doesn't predict anything, it juts measures that "80-90% of the time doctors do the same thing for folks who would hurt themselves".
It's not like they randomly picked a bunch of people off the street and determined from THAT. Like basically every single other artificial intelligence or machine learning story, it's a bunch of dumb hype, eventually to get folks investing in stupid startups.
So, once the computer diagnoses someone as highly likely to kill themselves in the next week, then does it (or the user) call the men in white coats to give the subject the coat with the funny sleeves? Therapists frequently have a statutory or license requirement to report potential suicides.
We don't know what the rate of false positives are, but with our current state of health insurance, getting locked up for a week and then getting a $50k bill would probably drive most people to suicide.
The title speaks of suicides while the article only of _attempted_ suicides, checking admissions to hospitals
Real suicides get admitted to the morgue instead.