Comment on An Algorithm Told Police She Was Safe. Then Her Husband Killed Her.

• barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Sounds like an expert system then (just judging by the age) which was AI before the whole machine learning craze, in any case you need to take the same kind of care when integrating them into whatever real-world structures there are.

  Medicine used them with quite some success problem being they take a long time to develop because humans need to input expert knowledge, and then they get outdated quite quickly.

  Back to the system though: 35 questions is not enough for these kinds of questions. And that’s not an issue of number of questions, but things like body language and tone of voice not being included.

  so it’s probably just some points assigned for the answers and maybe some simple arithmetic.

  Why yes, that’s all that machine learning is, a bunch of statistics :)

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  • madsen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    so it’s probably just some points assigned for the answers and maybe some simple arithmetic.
    

    Why yes, that’s all that machine learning is, a bunch of statistics :)

    I know, but that’s not what I meant. I mean literally something as simple and mundane as assigning points per answer and evaluating the final score:

    // Pseudo code
    risk = 0
    if (Q1 == true) {
        risk += 20
    }
    if (Q2 == true) {
        risk += 10
    }
    // etc...
    // Maybe throw in a bit of
    if (Q28 == true) {
        if (Q22 == true and Q23 == true) {
            risk *= 1.5
        } else {
            risk += 10
        }
    }
    
    // And finally, evaluate the risk:
    if (risk < 10) {
        return "negligible"
    } else if (risk >= 10 and risk < 40) {
        return "low risk"
    }
    // etc... You get the picture.
    

    And yes, I know I can just write if (Q1) {, but I wanted to make it a bit more accessible for non-programmers.

    The article gives absolutely no reason for us to assume it’s anything more than that, and I apparently missed the part of the article that mentioned that the system had been in use since 2007. I know we had machine learning too back then, but looking at the project description here: eucpn.org/sites/…/Buena practica VIOGEN_0.pdf it looks more like they looked at a bunch of cases (2159) and came up with the 35 questions and a scoring system not unlike what I just described above.

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