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

• madsen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

  source