Humans are
better at understanding fellow humans than machines are. But a new MIT study
suggests an algorithm can predict someone’s behavior faster and more reliably
than humans can. Researchers at MIT created the Data Science Machine to search
for patterns and choose which variables are the most relevant. It’s fairly
common for machines to analyze data, but humans are typically required to
choose which data points are relevant for analysis. In three competitions with
human teams, a machine made more accurate predictions than 615 of 906 human
teams. And while humans worked on their predictive algorithms for months, the
machine took two to 12 hours to produce each of its competition entries.
When one
competition asked teams to predict whether a student would drop out during the
next ten days, based on student interactions with resources on an online
course, there were many possible factors to consider. Teams might have looked
at how late students turned in their problem sets, or whether they spent any
time looking at lecture notes. But instead, the two most important indicators
turned out to be how far ahead of a deadline the student began working on their
problem set, and how much time the student spent on the course website. These
statistics weren’t directly collected by MIT’s online learning platform, but
they could be inferred from data available.
More
information: