Recently I’ve been remembering the first assignment of my “quantitative methods 2” course at IIMB back in 2004. In the first part of that course, we were learning regression. And so this assignment involved a regression problem. Not too hard at first sight – maybe 3 explanatory variables.
We had been randomly divided into teams of four. I remember working on it in the Computer Centre, in close proximity to some other teams. I remember trying to “do gymnastics” – combining variables, transforming them, all in the hope of trying to get the “best possible R square”. From what I remember, most of the groups went “R square hunting” that day. The assignment had been cleverly chosen such that for an academic exercise, the R Square wasn’t very high.
As an aside – one thing a lot of people take a long time to come to terms with is that in “real life” (industry problems) R squares aren’t usually that high. Forecast accuracy isn’t that high. And that the elegant methods they had learnt back in school / academia may not be as elegant any more in industry. I think I’ve written about this, but I can’t find the link now.
Anyway, back to QM2. I remember the professor telling us that three groups would be chosen at random on the day of the assignment submission, and from each of these three groups one person would be chosen at random who would have to present the group’s solution to the class. I remember that the other three people in my group all decided to bunk class that day! In any case, our group wasn’t called to present.
The whole point of this massive build up is – our approach (and the approach of most other groups) had been all wrong. We had just gone in a mad hunt for R square, not bothering to figure out whether the wild transformations and combinations that we were making made any business sense. Moreover, in our mad hunt for R square, we had all forgotten to consider whether a particular variable was significant, and if the regression itself was significant.
What we learnt was that while R square matters, it is not everything. The “model needs to be good”. The variables need to make sense. In statistics you can’t just go about optimising for one metric – there are several others. And this lesson has stuck with me. And guides how I approach all kinds of data modelling work. And I realise that is in conflict with the way data science is widely practiced nowadays.
The way data science is largely practiced in the wild nowadays is precisely a mad hunt for R Square (or area under ROC curve, if you’re doing a classification problem). Whether the variables used make sense doesn’t matter. Whether the transformations are sound doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all whether the model is “good”, or appropriate – the only measure of goodness of the model seems to be the R square!
In a way, contests such as Kaggle have exacerbated this trend. In contests, typically, there is a precise metric (such as R Square) that you are supposed to maximise. With contests being evaluated algorithmically, it is difficult to evaluate on multiple parameters – especially not whether “the model is good”. And since nowadays a lot of data scientists hone their skills by participating in contests such as on Kaggle, they are tuned to simply go R square hunting.
Also, the big difference between Kaggle and real life is that in Kaggle, the model that you build doesn’t matter. It’s just a combination. You get the best R square. You win. You take the prize. You go home.
You don’t need to worry about how the data for the model was collected. The model doesn’t have to be implemented. No business decisions need to be made based on the model. Contest done, model done.
Obviously that is not how things work in real life. Building the model is only one in a long series of steps in solving the business problem. And when you focus too much on just one thing – the model’s accuracy in the data that you have been given, a lot can be lost in the rest of the chain (including application of the model in future situations).
And in this way, by focussing on just a small portion of the entire data science process (model building), I think Kaggle (and other similar competition platforms) has actually done a massive disservice to data science itself.
Tailpiece
This is completely unrelated to the rest of the post, but too small to merit a post of its own.
Suppose you ask a software engineer to sort a few datasets. He goes about applying bubble sort, heap sort, quick sort, insertion sort and a whole host of other techniques. And then picks the one that sorted the given datasets fastest.
That’s precisely how it seems “data science” is practiced nowadays