Re: DM: Datamining tools ... black boxes...

at Feb 15, 2000 01:08:10 PM
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> From: "Sergei Ananyan" <s.ananyan@megaputer.com>
> 
> "Some Data Mining tools are presented like black boxes" simply because
> they ARE black boxes. It is not possible to make much sense of say, a
> trained
> Neural Network or the Memory Based Reasoning algorithm results. You have
> to believe the underlying math in order to trust their predictions.

That is not what "black box" means. "Black box" means you know what
is supposed to go into it and you know what is supposed to come out
of it, but you you don't know how the computation is done inside the
"box". It has nothing to do with interpretability of results. With
respect to commercial software, "black box" means that the algorithms
used inside the software are undocumented.

-- 

Warren S. Sarle       SAS Institute Inc.   The opinions expressed here
saswss@unx.sas.com    SAS Campus Drive     are mine and not necessarily
(919) 677-8000        Cary, NC 27513, USA  those of SAS Institute.

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