tantalor 2 months ago

Thanks for posting this! Much better source than CBC article.

I found this interesting:

> 1 truly alerted patient for every 2 falsely alerted patients was deemed an acceptable number of false alarms

  • shadowgovt 2 months ago

    Interesting, and I think it makes sense.

    In an ideal world, the nurse to patient ratio would be high enough that patients could be seen on regular rotation frequently. I've never been in a hospital where this was the case. So a system that can correctly prioritize resources for critical cases even if it's pulling resources away from non-critical cases will probably result in a net improved outcome.

    • rscho 2 months ago

      With such a false positive rate, I expect the staff on site to find ways to negate the effect pretty quickly.

      • Tostino 2 months ago

        I don't know...If every 3rd time I was alerted it was some relatively serious issue, vs how often there is a serious issue when just doing rounds that you stumble upon, I'd think that would be a pretty good alert rate compared to the norm. But then again, I'm not in healthcare.

      • inglor_cz 2 months ago

        2 in 3 isn't such a terrible false positive rate.

        If your home alarm caught one real burglar per each three occassions it triggered, I bet you wouldn't develop alarm fatigue. I certainly wouldn't.

      • firejake308 2 months ago

        While alarm fatigue is a real thing, the finding from this study is that they didn't, which is what matters.

        • [removed] 2 months ago
          [deleted]
jampekka 2 months ago

GOFAI from 1991! Wasn't AI back then though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_adaptive_regres...

  • lukeinator42 2 months ago

    I'm also shocked at how readable this wikipedia article is relative to most articles about statistical methods.

    • IshKebab 2 months ago

      Wow you're right. I mean it's all maths articles on Wikipedia, not just statistics.

      I think there are two causes of Wikipedia maths articles' general awfulness:

      1. They're probably written by people that just learnt about them and want to show off their superior knowledge rather than explain the concept.

      2. The people writing them think it's supposed to be a precise mathematical definition of the concept, rather than an easy to understand introduction. It's like they're writing a formal model instead of a tutorial.

      Often the Mathworld articles are a lot better than Wikipedia, when they exist at least.

  • 0cf8612b2e1e 2 months ago

    Fun bit of trivia (though depressing) from the wiki

      The term "MARS" is trademarked and licensed to Salford Systems. In order to avoid trademark infringements, many open-source implementations of MARS are called "Earth".
  • blitzar 2 months ago

    Multivariate adaptive regression spline saw the hype and pivoted to AI

pj808 2 months ago

MARS is one of the smartest methods: intuitive, hard to break, easy to quantify. Friedman was a savant.