Re:The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis [pdf]
by rm999 on Sunday March 23, 2014 @06:19PM
(#7455480)
>It's one thousand times better to fail when trying to predict the flu epidemics than successfully using technology to bomb weddings.
That's a pointless and irrelevant comparison.
There's a cost to false positives, e.g. creating more vaccinations than necessary; fortunately I don't think the CDC or any other government organizations made any policy decisions based on Google Flu. As a person who works with a lot of data, I think applications like Google Flu have a lot of potential to do a lot of good. But it sounds like Google wasn't properly rigorous in their experiments if Google Flu is such a failure.
That's a pointless and irrelevant comparison.
There's a cost to false positives, e.g. creating more vaccinations than necessary; fortunately I don't think the CDC or any other government organizations made any policy decisions based on Google Flu. As a person who works with a lot of data, I think applications like Google Flu have a lot of potential to do a lot of good. But it sounds like Google wasn't properly rigorous in their experiments if Google Flu is such a failure.