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Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration

2020; National Academy of Sciences; Volume: 117; Issue: 15 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1073/pnas.1915006117

1091-6490

Matthew Salganik, Ian Lundberg, Alexander T. Kindel, Caitlin Ahearn, Khaled AlGhoneim, Abdullah Almaatouq, Drew Altschul, Jennie E. Brand, Nicole Bohme Carnegie, Ryan Compton, Debanjan Datta, Thomas Davidson, Anna Filippova, Connor Gilroy, Brian J. Goode, Eaman Jahani, Ridhi Kashyap, Antje Kirchner, Stephen McKay, Allison C. Morgan, Alex Pentland, Kivan Polimis, Louis Raes, Daniel E. Rigobon, Claudia V. Roberts, Diana M. Stanescu, Yoshihiko Suhara, Adaner Usmani, Erik Wang, Muna Adem, Abdulla Alhajri, Bedoor AlShebli, Redwane Amin, Ryan Amos, Lisa P. Argyle, Livia Baer-Bositis, Moritz Büchi, Bo-Ryehn Chung, William Eggert, Gregory Faletto, Zhilin Fan, Jeremy Freese, Tejomay Gadgil, Josh Gagné, Yue Gao, Andrew Halpern-Manners, Sonia P. Hashim, Sonia Hausen, Guanhua He, Kimberly Higuera, Bernie Hogan, Ilana M. Horwitz, Lisa M. Hummel, Naman Jain, Kun Jin, David Jurgens, Patrick Kaminski, Areg Karapetyan, E. H. Kim, Ben Leizman, Naijia Liu, Malte Möser, Andrew E. Mack, MaryAnn Mahajan, Noah Mandell, Helge Marahrens, Diana Mercado-Garcia, Viola Mocz, Katariina Mueller-Gastell, Ahmed Musse, Qiankun Niu, W. S. W. Nowak, Hamidreza Omidvar, Andrew Or, Karen Ouyang, Katy M. Pinto, Ethan Porter, Kristin E. Porter, Crystal Qian, Tamkinat Rauf, Anahit Sargsyan, Thomas Schaffner, Landon Schnabel, Bryan Schonfeld, Ben Sender, Jonathan D. Tang, Emma Tsurkov, Austin van Loon, Onur Varol, Xiafei Wang, Zhi Wang, Julia Wang, Flora Wang, Samantha Weissman, Kirstie Whitaker, Maria Wolters, Wei Lee Woon, James K. Wu, Catherine J. Wu, Kengran Yang, Jingwen Yin, Bingyu Zhao, Chenyun Zhu, Jeanne Brooks‐Gunn, Barbara E. Engelhardt, Moritz Hardt, Dean Knox, Karen Levy, Arvind Narayanan, Brandon Stewart, Duncan J. Watts, Sara McLanahan,

Health disparities and outcomes

How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly better than those from a simple benchmark model. Within each outcome, prediction error was strongly associated with the family being predicted and weakly associated with the technique used to generate the prediction. Overall, these results suggest practical limits to the predictability of life outcomes in some settings and illustrate the value of mass collaborations in the social sciences.