[cwilkes]

What if it came out of a neural net or some other system that can't be easily explained? There's no real "specific calculation" to show.

Now if they were using decision trees, i.e. If the person has 3 or more felonies they get a 5 rating, that could be presented.

I'm curious about how much of a feedback loop this process has. The model was probably trained on old data and never updated. Also how does it take into account features that it doesn't know about (the article mentions one guy turning to Christianity)? I doubt if there is a mechanism for people to be asked why they did or did not reoffend. Even if they did how much should it be trusted?

[SixSigma]

Neural nets may be opaque but they are not secret.

[Malarkey73]

I have this very concern about using SVM in medical research.

I also worry greatly about diagnostic predictive models that maximise overall prediction success but don't balance the relative consequences of false positives and false negatives.