On 1/19/2011 12:01 AM, Rich Cooper wrote:
> But instances DO define the types, WITH/USING pattern proxies.
> That works well, in text mining, linguistics, and the social and medical
> sciences.
>
> I think it's the distinction between empirical sciences (instances to types)
> and so called pure sciences, based on very limited views of reality (types
> to instances). (01)
This gets into critical issues about scientific methodology and
the problems with blindly using the results of data mining. (02)
What you get from data mining is *not* a definition of a new type
from instances. What you get is a "co-occurrence pattern" or
a "correlation". Such patterns can often be clues to a useful
type definition, but they can often be misleading or worse. (03)
That's why scientists don't accept an observed correlation as
a law until it has (a) made reliable predictions of future
observations, and (b) has been connected by reasonable chains
of inference to other established laws. (04)
But I'll grant that for many applications, such as sending
junk mail, the cost of testing the correlation is higher than
the cost of dumping unwanted mail on people for whom the
prediction fails. (05)
John (06)
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