Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Oral Poster

Human Expertise in Algorithmic Prediction

Rohan Alur · Manish Raghavan · Devavrat Shah

East Exhibit Hall A-C #3207
[ ]
Wed 11 Dec 11 a.m. PST — 2 p.m. PST
 
Oral presentation: Oral Session 1B: Human-AI Interaction
Wed 11 Dec 10 a.m. PST — 11 a.m. PST

Abstract:

We introduce a novel framework for incorporating human expertise into algorithmic predictions. Our approach leverages human judgment to distinguish inputs which are algorithmically indistinguishable, or "look the same" to predictive algorithms. We argue that this framing clarifies the problem of human-AI collaboration in prediction tasks, as experts often form judgments by drawing on information which is not encoded in an algorithm's training data. Algorithmic indistinguishability yields a natural test for assessing whether experts incorporate this kind of "side information", and further provides a simple but principled method for selectively incorporating human feedback into algorithmic predictions. We show that this method provably improves the performance of any feasible algorithmic predictor and precisely quantify this improvement. We find empirically that although algorithms often outperform their human counterparts on average, human judgment can improve algorithmic predictions on specific instances (which can be identified ex-ante). In an X-ray classification task, we find that this subset constitutes nearly 30% of the patient population. Our approach provides a natural way of uncovering this heterogeneity and thus enabling effective human-AI collaboration.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content