Make Your Crystal Ball Shine

“These mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, were beyond dispute or appeal.”

[Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’neil]

The fortune-tellers show our future with their crystal balls. We don’t know how this crystal ball works but we just believe (or not) its prediction. In fact, the fortune-tellers don’t know, too. The only thing they can do is to make their crystal balls shine.

Most of the predictive models based on machine learning are black-box models like crystal balls so we cannot know what happens inside. Someone worries about this opacity but this opacity may eliminate prejudice and bias. The one thing we can do is to feed them on unbiased and accurate data.