# [QUESTION]: Academic social science and machine learning

I asked this question on Facebook [here](https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10203548307964234), and got some interesting answers, but I thought it would be interesting to ask LessWrong and get a larger range of opinions. I've modified the list of options somewhat.

What explains why some classification, prediction, and regression methods are common in academic social science, while others are common in machine learning and data science?

For instance, I've encountered [probit models](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probit_model) in some academic social science, but not in machine learning.

Similarly, I've encountered [support vector machines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine), [artificial neural networks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network), and [random forests](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_forest) in machine learning, but not in academic social science.

The main algorithms that I believe are common to academic social science and machine learning are the most standard regression algorithms: linear regression and logistic regression.

Possibilities that come to mind:

(0) My observation is wrong and/or the whole question is misguided.

(1) The focus in machine learning is on algorithms that can perform well on large data sets. Thus, for instance, probit models may be academically useful but don't scale up as well as logistic regression.

(2) Academic social scientists take time to catch up with new machine learning approaches. Of the methods mentioned above, random forests and support vector machines was introduced as recently as 1995. Neural networks are older but their practical implementation is about as recent. Moreover, the practical implementations of these algorithm in the standard statistical softwares and packages that academics rely on is even more recent. (This relates to point (4)).

(3) Academic social scientists are focused on publishing papers, where the goal is generally to determine whether a hypothesis is true. Therefore, they rely on approaches that have clear rules for hypothesis testing and for establishing statistical significance (see also [this post of mine](https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10203090489719064)). Many of the new machine learning approaches don't have clearly defined statistical approaches for significance testing. Also, the strength of machine learning approaches is more _exploratory_ than testing _already formulated hypotheses_ (this relates to point (5)).

(4) Some of the new methods are complicated to code, and academic social scientists don't know enough mathematics, computer science, or statistics to cope with the methods (this may change if they're taught more about these methods in graduate school, but the relative newness of the methods is a factor here, relating to (2)).

(5) It's hard to _interpret_ the results of fancy machine learning tools in a manner that yields social scientific insight. The results of a linear or logistic regression can be interpreted somewhat intuitively: the parameters (coefficients) associated with individual features describe the extent to which those features affect the output variable. Modulo issues of feature scaling, larger coefficients mean those features play a bigger role in determining the output. Pairwise and listwise R^2 values provide additional insight on how much signal and noise there is in individual features. But if you're looking at a neural network, it's quite hard to infer human-understandable rules from that. (The opposite direction is not too hard: it is possible to convert human-understandable rules to a decision tree and then to use a neural network to approximate that, and add appropriate fuzziness. But the neural networks we obtain as a result of machine learning optimization may be quite different from those that we can interpret as humans). To my knowledge, there haven't been attempts to reinterpret neural network results in human-understandable terms, though Sebastian Kwiatkowski's [comment](https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10203548307964234?comment_id=10203549211066811&offset=0) on my Facebook post points to [an example](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2002512) where the results of  naive Bayes and SVM classifiers for hotel reviews could be translated into human-understandable terms (namely, reviews that mentioned physical aspects of the hotel, such as "small bedroom", were more likely to be truthful than reviews that talked about the reasons for the visit or the company that sponsored the visit). But Kwiatkowski's comment also pointed to other instances where the machine's algorithms weren't human-interpretable.

What's your personal view on my main question, and on any related issues?