

#NobodyKnowsYoureADog - Garbage
http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/441-NobodyKnowsYoureADog.html

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DarkShikari
_It was only 60%-70% accurate, but that is much better than 50/50 random
guessing._

Everything like this (there's other attempts at the same thing, with similar
results) is more than useless for most practical purposes. More so, it's a
great example of machine learning used all too wrong.

You can blindly apply machine learning to almost any corpus and "predict"
almost anything with 60% accuracy without gaining any real understanding of
the corpus or the correlations you're trying to tease out. Often the only
reason you can do better than guessing at all is because your corpus isn't
perfectly unbiased itself. And with 60% accuracy, good luck using the results
for anything!

This is doubly the case here, where they're actually just using word
frequency, not a real analysis of sentence structure. It's the simplest,
dumbest form of natural-language-based machine learning, and it shows. I've
used the tool derived from their research and it's beyond useless: it
classifies every single one of my posts wildly differently.

Because it's solely based on a few dozen words' frequencies, it's more
affected by the _topic_ than anything else. Topic might actually account for a
large portion of the bias in their corpus. But if we start claiming topic to
be a sort of "gender identification" system, all we've done is enforce
stereotypes.

~~~
corin_
I can't speak to how good this particular example is, or any other similar
solutions either.

However, if it can predict better than 50/50 (e.g. 60-70%) then that can
certainly be useful. Take digital advertising for example, many advertisers
want to target either female or male demographic exclusively. 60% might not be
enough to sell adverts as "this will only be shown to men", but it might help
you behind the scenes serve the most relevant adverts to people, potentially
increasing click-through rate, and therefore the value of your service. Sure
there are other examples, but my mind is stuck in digital banner advertising
this afternoon.

