June 24th, 2024

Six things to keep in mind while reading biology ML papers

The article outlines considerations for reading biology machine learning papers, cautioning against blindly accepting results, emphasizing critical evaluation, understanding limitations, and recognizing biases. It promotes a nuanced and informed reading approach.

Read original articleLink Icon
Six things to keep in mind while reading biology ML papers

The article discusses six key considerations when reading biology machine learning papers. It highlights the challenges of relying on established benchmarks, the importance of critically evaluating baseline comparisons, and the prevalence of curiosity-driven research in the field. The article emphasizes the need to understand the limitations of assays used in research and the potential biases in evaluations. It also touches on the issue of data leakage in pair-based problems like molecule-protein interactions. The authors caution against naively accepting strong results on benchmarks and stress the significance of recognizing implicit limitations in research methodologies. They suggest a more critical approach to assessing the real-world impact of novel approaches in biology ML. The article aims to provide readers with a nuanced perspective on interpreting and evaluating biology machine learning papers, encouraging a thoughtful and informed reading approach.

Link Icon 1 comments
By @j7ake - 4 months
What’s interesting is that a lot of bio ML papers claim they can make new discoveries using their methods, but never actually make any new discoveries. Even high-end papers would stop at rediscovering some known biology rather than find something previously unknown.

Bio ML papers can spit out all sorts of predictions, but it’s hard to distinguish the nonesense with the real, and there is no sense of the false discovery rates.

If you want to convince non ML people about your method, go discover something new, unexpected, or surprising. You will convince people much more than gaming benchmarks.