It's somewhat heart-warming to read the comments here about machine learning. I did my PhD in machine learning from 2007 to 2012, and the main reason I left research was because of the widespread fraud.

Most papers reported an improved performance over some other methods in very specific data sets, but source code was almost always not provided. Once, I dug so deeply into a very highly cited paper that I understood not only that the results were faked, but precisely the tricks that were used to fake them.

I believe scientific fraud arises primarily from two causes:

- Publish or perish. Everyone's desperate to publish. Some Principal Investigators have a new paper roughly every other week!

- Careerism. For some highly ambitious people, publishing papers comes before everything else, even if that means committing fraud. This happens even with highly successful researchers, who have the occasional brilliant, highly cited paper, but who also publish a lot of incremental, dubious work.

P.S. Mildly off-topic, but I love the Ethereum research community at https://ethresear.ch/ , precisely because it is so open and transparent! I wish an equivalent community existed for machine learning.