Welcome to the ninety eighth ever issue of Monday Morning Data Science from the Fred Hutch Data Science Laboratory. We are excited to show you what we have been working on (Fresh from the Lab), plus links that we think you would be interested in (Our Weekly Bookmarks Bar). Part of the purpose of this newsletter is to start conversations, so if you have a question or there is something you would like to share with us please let us know by responding directly to this email.
Our Weekly Bookmarks Bar
[Article: One Simple Way to Get Better at Reading Data] Friend of the lab Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Jeffrey D. Camm wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review encouraging readers to make better data-driven decisions by going beyond surface-level statistics by consistently asking, “What’s the denominator?” This simple question helps uncover misleading uses of percentages, biased data presentations, and flawed interpretations, leading to more clear and accurate conclusions.
[Blog Post: Deep Learning Gets the Glory, Deep Fact Checking Gets Ignored] Data Science hero Rachel Thomas wrote about a deep learning model for predicting enzyme functions, which received high visibility and acclaim, despite later being shown to contain hundreds of significant errors by a follow-up study that got far less attention. Read on for her discussion of how current academic and publishing incentives favor flashy AI results over meticulous, domain-expert-led validation, even when the latter is critical for scientific accuracy.
As always you can contact us by replying directly to this email, you can contact the Data Science Lab at data@fredhutch.org, or you are welcome to join us on the Fred Hutch Data Slack Workspace. For more information about the Fred Hutch Data Science Lab, visit our website: https://hutchdatascience.org/. See you next week!
- The Fred Hutch Data Science Laboratory