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Wait wait wait. So they're killing people based on a model that fails Statistics 101!? No accounting for base rates? No cross-validation!?

God fucking damnit, why the fuck does our government think killing should be cheaper and easier than healing!? We put new medical treatments through decades of difficult scientific tests, but have none at all for strictly invalid ways to kill people?

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I do not think you completely understood the article.

The models as described in the article do seem to have glaring flaws. However, the article did not show that anyone has been killed based on the models alone.

I'm pretty sure I did. Random Decision Forest with no regularization, no probabilistic accounting for the base rate of the target class, and with the test and train sets mixed rather than performing proper cross-validation. They've almost definitely overfit, and almost definitely killed someone who wasn't actually a terrorist.

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