The self‐assessment trap: can we all be better than average?

The self-assessment trap: can we all be better than average?

Computational systems biology seems to be caught in what we call the ‘self-assessment trap’, in which researchers wishing to publish their analytical methods are required by referees or by editorial policy (e.g., Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, Nucleic Acids Research) to compare the performance of their own algorithms against other methodologies, thus being forced to be judge, jury and exec...

Better than average? When can we say that subsampling of items is better than statistical summary representations?

Myczek and Simons (2008) have described a computational model that subsamples a few items from a set with high accuracy, showing that this approach can do as well as, or better than, a model that captures statistical representations of the set. Although this is an intriguing existence proof, some caution should be taken before we consider their approach as a model for human behavior. In particu...

When can we do better than autarky?

This paper provides a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of nonautarkic contract in a risk sharing model with two-sided lack of commitment. Verifying the condition takes just one Gaussian elimination of a matrix. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Can we do better than dobutamine?

Why Experimentation can be better than \ Perfect

Many problems correspond to the classical control task of determining the appropriate control action to take, given some (sequence of) observations. One standard approach to learning these control rules, called behavior cloning, involves watching a perfect operator operate a plant, and then trying to emulate its behavior. In the experimental learning approach, by contrast, the learner rst guess...