Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
Took me quite some time to find the paper that seemed to describe the ML algo[1]. Pretty disappointingly domain-specific and barebones ("logistic regression").<p>And indeed, model form was so unimportant that it was relegated to the supplement. [2]<p>Yet again evidence that access to data and domain knowledge trump fancy ML algos 10/10 times.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0923753420360580" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092375342...</a><p>[2]
> Custom software was built to classify samples using source models that recognized methylation patterns per region as similar to those derived from a particular cancer type, fol- lowed by a pair of ensemble logistic regressions: one to determine cancer/non-cancer status and the other to resolve the TOO to one of the listed sites (supplementary information)