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Comment by chrisa | Hacker News Reader

As the first comment there points out, a 96% accuracy doesn't mean much without knowing the false positive and false negative rates.

I have no doubt that this is good work in the right direction - but the headline alone doesn't make it a home run.

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Do human doctors have a better rate? And at what cost/throughput?

This is the base rate fallacy.

    return “healthy”;

would have a 99.9% accuracy right now.

Ahh, you need to use ROC AUC or something.

ROC AUC is somewhat meaningless when basically any amount of false positives is going to massively decrease the utility of the test.

I think you have a good idea for an AI startup here.

For bonus points, have it return one out of every 1000 or so requests with "not hot dog."

I suppose in a case where like half the population had the virus those might factor less. And if the errors skew towards false positives, it could be a quick prescreen to get an enriched pool of candidates for manual checking. Definitely not a panacea yet though

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