Theory In, Theory Out: How social theory can solve problems that machine learning can't

01/09/2020
by   Jason Radford, et al.
0

Research at the intersection of machine learning and the social sciences has provided critical new insights into social behavior. At the same time, scholars have identified myriad ways in which machine learning, when applied without care, can also lead to incorrect and harmful claims about people (e.g. about the biological nature of sexuality), and/or to discriminatory outcomes. Here, we argue that such issues arise primarily because of the lack of, or misuse of, social theory. Walking through every step of the machine learning pipeline, we identify ways in which social theory must be involved in order to address problems that technology alone cannot solve, and provide a pathway towards the use of theory to this end.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
01/09/2020

Theory In, Theory Out: The uses of social theory in machine learning for social science

Research at the intersection of machine learning and the social sciences...
research
07/08/2016

Proceedings of the 2016 ICML Workshop on #Data4Good: Machine Learning in Social Good Applications

This is the Proceedings of the ICML Workshop on #Data4Good: Machine Lear...
research
02/09/2021

The Use and Misuse of Counterfactuals in Ethical Machine Learning

The use of counterfactuals for considerations of algorithmic fairness an...
research
03/04/2020

What is affordance theory and how can it be used in communication research?

Affordance theory proposes that the use of an object is intrinsically de...
research
01/28/2019

A Framework for Understanding Unintended Consequences of Machine Learning

As machine learning increasingly affects people and society, it is impor...
research
11/24/2022

The intersection of machine learning with forecasting and optimisation: theory and applications

Forecasting and optimisation are two major fields of operations research...
research
06/30/2022

Predicting Ulnar Collateral Ligament Injury in Rookie Major League Baseball Pitchers

In the growing world of machine learning and data analytics, scholars ar...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset