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Venkat, Can computers make better decisions by mining?Hmm....I am sure with bad data/attributes irrelevant of whether its a human or a computer, both can go wrong. But given good attributes/data a computer has a better chance in computing more quantities of data in lesser time than humans.
And to define something as good data/important attributes a computer needs a human.
Charlie Kufs, IMHO
I think computer algorithms are best when the important variables are
defined. Airplane autopilots work great unless something unexpected
happens, then you need a pilot. But humans make bad decisions often
because they ignore relevant data or pay too much attention to
irrelevant data that should be ignored. How many bad business decisions
have been made because of office politics or a CEO's ego?
Karl Brazier, Usual? Better?
I was tempted to vote for 'usually', but then decided the question gives
rise to others to which I don't have the answer, and which seem rather
substantive to me. In particular, when we say usually, has anyone
investigated how many decisions people make? I imagine people are
making a vast number of unrecorded decisions all the time and we only
have a tiny and biased sample of decisions to consider from areas where
formality and recording of decision making are reasonably commonplace
(e.g. in institutional management).
Then, there is the issue of what is a 'better' decision. Judged using
what metric? Some kind of quality-of-life impact metric would seem like
the obvious thing to consider, but designing these is itself a
far-from-solved (and never entirely likely to be) problem.
So I have decided my answer is simply 'don't know' and have abstained
from the vote. Can't help thinking, though, maybe this is an area for
that 'Grand Challenge'...?
Editor, Do computers make better decisions than humans?
Recently, New York Times wrote about a professor from Netherlands who is convinced that computer models generally make better decisions than humans.
He even issued a challenge late last year to any company willing to pit its humans against his algorithms.
See
KDnuggets News 06:n14, item 16. What do you think?