Re:Make Algorithms Accountable
by yummyfajitas on Monday August 01, 2016 @07:06PM
(#12206758)
I wrote the article. It's always tricky to me to figure out how to phrase a statement about a frequentist method (since frequentist methods formally say so little). I may have phrased this incorrectly.
So what I'm attempting to say is that they ran a statistical test, were unable to reject the null hypothesis, and then wrote an article phrased as if they did exactly that. But I think you are right that my phrasing is incorrectly, however.
Re:Make Algorithms Accountable
by GFK_of_xmaspast on Monday August 01, 2016 @08:30PM
(#12207127)
> It's always tricky to me to figure out how to phrase a statement about a frequentist method
That seems to me to be a fault whose location is not in your stars.
"The predictor is probably not biased against any particular race - the race_factorAfrican-American:score_factorHigh term is not statistically significant. Or, as ProPublica puts it, it's "almost statistically significant"."
I don't think you can conclude that the predictor is probably not biased against any particular race -- you can only use significance to reject the null hypothesis, not prove the null hypothesis (especially since the significance is still somewhat high). Am I misunderstanding the claim in the article?