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by bunderbunder 2785 days ago
I guess it depends. I have the luxury of working in a very "this is machine learning, which is not to be confused with statistical inference" problem domain. It doesn't really even really make sense to interpret most the models I build as describing any sort of causal relationship, and when people are looking at the parameter estimates, they're really just trying to figure out, "What does this model think is important?"
1 comments

That sounds nice!

Feature ranking seems like a clearly safe interpretation of betas, though I've been bitten too often by letting glm (in R) scale my predictors, giving me back estimates on the original scales, and thus incomparable, and seen it happen to others even more. Easy to miss when your original scales aren't all that different.