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UK creating ‘murder prediction’ tool to identify people most likely to kill
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Data scientist here; there simply are not enough murders to model this, so they will need to use proxies for “likely” murderers (like any sort of violent crime). That means the model will very strongly target people who are over-policed (minorities) and those more likely to actually get caught and charged for things, and thus be in the training data set (poor people). It will also fail spectacularly for this purpose because even a highly accurate model will produce almost 100% false positives -again, because actual murders are so vanishingly rare. The math just doesn’t work.