Comment

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

The crucial point is: 8% of the decisions turn out to be wrong or misjudged.

The article says:

Yet roughly 8 percent of women who the algorithm found to be at negligible risk and 14 percent at low risk have reported being harmed again, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the system.

Granted, neither “negligible” or “low risk” means “no risk”, but I think 8% and 14% are far too high numbers for those categories.

Furthermore, there’s this crucial bit:

At least 247 women have also been killed by their current or former partner since 2007 after being assessed by VioGén, according to government figures. While that is a tiny fraction of gender violence cases, it points to the algorithm’s flaws. The New York Times found that in a judicial review of 98 of those homicides, 55 of the slain women were scored by VioGén as negligible or low risk for repeat abuse.

So in the 98 murders they reviewed, the algorithm put more than 50% of them at negligible or low risk for repeat abuse. That’s a fucking coin flip!

source

Sort:hotnew top

roguetrick@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You’ll get that result without an algorithm as well unfortunately. A domestic violence interview often doesn’t result in you getting the truth of what happens because the victim is often economically and emotionally dependent on their partner. It’s helpful to have an algorithm that makes you ask the right questions but there’s still no way I know of to get the right answers of those questions from a victim 100 percent of the time.

source
- madsen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Odd. I replied to this comment, but now my reply is gone. Gonna try again and type up as much as I can remember.
  
  Regardless, an algorithm expecting binary answers will obviously not take para- and extralinguistic cues into account. That extra 50 ms hesitation, the downwards glance and the voice cracking when answering “no” to “has he ever tried to strangle you before?” has a reasonable chance to get picked up by a human, but when reducing it to something that the algorithm can handle, it’s just a simple “no”. Humans are really good at picking up on such cues, even if they aren’t consciously aware that they’re doing it, but if said humans are preoccupied with staring into a computer screen in order to input the answers to the questionnaire, then there’s a much higher chance that they’ll miss them too. I honestly only see negatives here.
  
  It’s helpful to have an algorithm that makes you ask the right questions […]
  
  Arguably a piece of paper could solve that problem.
  
  Seriously. 55 victims out of the 98 homicide cases sampled were deemed at negligible or low risk. If a non-algorithm-assisted department presented those numbered I’d expect them to be looking for new jobs real fast.
  
  source
EatATaco@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

So in the 98 murders they reviewed, the algorithm put more than 50% of them at negligible or low risk for repeat abuse. That’s a fucking coin flip!

This is not at all how you interpret that number.

Let’s say there is a group of 100 people. 8 get killed. If you randomly assigned them into two groups, the expected number would be that you would be right about 4 and wrong about 46.

But say you predict that 96 will be fine, and 4 would be murdered…and all 4 of those are murdered…well, about the 8 killed you would only have a 50% chance of being right.

Just a coin flip? Even though you were right 96% of the time?

source