How good were the winning models? The sophisticated machine-learning algorithms trained on a large data set did, of course, outperform the predictions of simple linear models (and would, by extension, out-predict human judges). But the improvement the AI models delivered over a very simple model was slight, and their predictive accuracy remained disappointingly low. When predicting evictions, the best model achieved a correlation of .22 (PC = 57%). Similar results were found for other single-event outcomes, such as whether the primary caregiver had been laid off or had been in job training and
...more
