Do you have a bias bias?
I'm finishing up Enlightenment Now by Canadian, Harvard Psychology Professor Steven Pinker and I came across a term with which I was unfamiliar. Here is my attempt to understand it by explaining it. If anyone out there who knows this idea better than I do, please add/revise my explanation. The benefits of simplicity are overlooked because of a bias bias . ie. Preference for more sophisticated models designed to avoid bias but may not lead to the most accurate prediction. When dealing with predictions, error occurs for two reasons, the first is due to bias , the inability of the model to represent certain patterns that are being observed. So if we're trying to predict how many men vs. women were going to apply for a job in engineering, our prediction model might be biased if we are only basing our prediction on past data, since today's women might be more likely to apply for engineering jobs than those of the past. The other type of error comes from variance, which is the ...