I know only a thimble-full of stuff about "machine learning". It's on my ever-lengthening list of things to read more about. I intend to look for how it handles the well-known econometric problem of over-fitting. I thought, surely, it has some excellent way to handle that. But maybe not:
Dr Genevera Allen from Rice University in Houston said that the increased use of such systems was contributing to a “crisis in science”.
She warned scientists that if they didn’t improve their techniques they would be wasting both time and money. Her research was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. . . .
But, according to Dr Allen, the answers they come up with are likely to be inaccurate or wrong because the software is identifying patterns that exist only in that data set and not the real world.