Date: Wednesday, 8 May 2024
Time: 16:00 - 17:00 h
Location: N55 SR 210/211

Dr. Max Westphal - Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine, Bremen

Improving model and algorithm evaluation in predictive modelling (one step at a time)

In applied predictive modelling, practitioners usually face many methodological questions which are related to different objectives of the overall development and evaluation pipeline, e.g.:

“How should I split my data for training, comparison and testing purposes?”
“Which metric is suitable for assessing the utility of the developed models?”
“How can I quantify uncertainty of my evaluation results?”

While “standard” answers to these questions exist, it is rarely clear if and in what sense they are optimal or even admissible for the prediction task at hand. In the first part of the talk, we will consider three relevant and concrete examples of such questions related to model evaluation. Furthermore, we will illustrate how the derivation of more appropriate (than “standard”) answers is in principle possible based on recent methodological work.

However, finding problem-tailored solutions in the scientific literature can also be difficult and time-consuming, in particular for practitioners without a specific data science background. In the second part of the talk, I will therefore introduce the expert system mlguide which is currently under active development at Fraunhofer MEVIS. mlguide aims to provide interactive support to practitioners for solving methodological questions in applied machine learning problems, such as those mentioned before. I will illustrate the overall system architecture, some insights into the guidance engine, and current limitations. To conclude, I will give an outlook on planned features and user research.

Registration is not necessary.

The seminar series in Epidemiology and Biostatistics is an ongoing event. We regularly invite outstanding speakers from the fields of Epidemiology and Biometry.

See German page for more information: