AI predicts certain esophageal and stomach cancers three years before diagnosis

Re:AI predicts certain esophageal and stomach cancers three ... by iptq on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @10:55AM (#37237014)

I wish that reputable reporting on this kind of topic would start putting accuracy next to what it can reportedly do. I remember visiting a machine learning poster session where many of the posters reported results with accuracy as low as 30%.

If a program is able to predict this once or twice it's not a miracle. If it's able to do so with 60% I'd raise some eyebrows. But I'd say it's only a turning point when it's able to beat false positive rates of human doctors. Without an accuracy score, this news is absolutely meaningless.

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Re:AI predicts certain esophageal and stomach cancers three ... by r-zip on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @11:58AM (#37238043)

Even with an accuracy score, it’s meaningless. Accuracy isn’t the right metric.

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Re:AI predicts certain esophageal and stomach cancers three ... by glompers on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @01:19PM (#37239202)

If you like, please mention more; I at least am interested to hear

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Re:AI predicts certain esophageal and stomach cancers three ... by malfist on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @01:36PM (#37239466)

Consider it this way.

If your AI algo scanned the general population and it said 100% of the time, "no risk of esophageal cancer" It'd still be 99.5% accurate.

It's highly accurate. And useless.

To get a good idea of how useful it is, you need to know it's false negative rate and false positive rate as well as it's accuracy.

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Re:AI predicts certain esophageal and stomach cancers three ... by jncfhnb on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @11:58AM (#37238046)

Accuracy is well understood to be a terrible, misleading metric and any reputable report would strive to avoid emphasizing its importance.

For those curious their test set AUC appears to be 77.

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Re:AI predicts certain esophageal and stomach cancers three ... by monero-xmr on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @12:05PM (#37238158)

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but if you could have a test that doesn’t say anything if it isn’t sure, but if it is sure with very high confidence gives you a true positive, that has a lot of value.

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Re:AI predicts certain esophageal and stomach cancers three ... by ShroudedNight on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @01:41PM (#37239524)

As an aside, this was also the only strategy that seemed to scale in intrusion detection.

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