Question: What weakness could supervised models show if they are used for datasets not well-balanced?
Evidence: Supervised learning is frequently used to scale up analyses. For example, BIBREF42 wanted to analyze the motivations of Movember campaign participants. By developing a classifier based on a small set of annotations, they were able to expand the analysis to over 90k participants.
The choice of supervised learning model is often guided by the task definition and the label types. For example, to identify stance towards rumors based on sequential annotations, an algorithm for learning from sequential BIBREF43 or time series data BIBREF44 could be used. The features (sometimes called variables or predictors) are used by the model to make the predictions. They may vary from content-based features such as single words, sequences of words, or information about their syntactic structure, to meta-information such as user or network information. Deciding on the features requires experimentation and expert insight and is often called feature engineering. For insight-driven analysis, we are often interested in why a prediction has been made and features that can be interpreted by humans may be preferred. Recent neural network approaches often use simple features as input (such as word embeddings or character sequences), which requires less feature engineering but make interpretation more difficult.
Supervised models are powerful, but they can latch on to spurious features of the dataset. This is particularly true for datasets that are not well-balanced, and for annotations that are noisy. In our introductory example on hate speech in Reddit BIBREF0 , the annotations are automatically derived from the forum in which each post appears, and indeed, many of the posts in the forums (subreddits) that were banned by Reddit would be perceived by many as hate speech. But even in banned subreddits, not all of the content is hate speech (e.g., some of the top features were self-referential like the name of the subreddit) but a classifier would learn a high weight for these features.
Even when expert annotations are available on the level of individual posts, spurious features may remain. BIBREF45 produced expert annotations of hate speech on Twitter. They found that one of the strongest features for sexism is the name of an Australian TV show, because people like to post sexist comments about the contestants. If we are trying to make claims about what inhibits or encourages hate speech, we would not want those claims to be tied to the TV show's popularity. Such problems are inevitable when datasets are not well-balanced over time, across genres, topics, etc. Especially with social media data, we lack a clear and objective definition of `balance' at this time.
The risk of supervised models latching on to spurious features reinforces the need for interpretability. Although the development of supervised models is usually performance driven, placing more emphasis on interpretability could increase the adoption of these models in insight-driven analyses. One way would be to only use models that are already somewhat interpretable, for example models that use a small number of human-interpretable features. Rather than imposing such restrictions, there is also work on generating post-hoc explanations for individual predictions (e.g., BIBREF46 ), even when the underlying model itself is very complex.
Supervised models are powerful, but they can latch on to spurious features of the dataset. This is particularly true for datasets that are not well-balanced, and for annotations that are noisy.
Answer: Supervised models may latch on to spurious features of such datasets