Opinion: Machine learning for clinical decision-making: pay attention to what you don’t see
Don't take results from machine learning algorithms at face value. Ask what information isn't available. What subgroups haven't been prioritized? Who is on the research team?
Even as machine learning and artificial intelligence are drawing substantial attention in health care, overzealousness for these technologies has created an environment in which other critical aspects of the research are often overlooked.
There’s no question that the increasing availability of large data sources and off-the-shelf machine learning tools offer tremendous resources to researchers. Yet a lack of understanding about the limitations of both the data and the algorithms can lead to erroneous or unsupported conclusions.
Given that machine learning in the health domain can have a direct impact on people’s lives, broad claims emerging from this kind of research should not be embraced in the data and analyses.
