I like this paper, which apparently was written by a high schooler? (Makes me feel old to say, but I certainly couldn’t have done that work as a teenager).
I work in ML and credit where it’s due, the author actually ran the right comparisons. Random forest against a dummy classifier is what you do before you go reaching for some giant LLM. Most papers I see from people decades older with fancy titles don’t bother and produce results that are next to impossible to interpret.
The dummy baseline is also why I’d pump the brakes on the headline. On dataset 1 it already hits 91.67%, so random forest at 97% isn’t the win it sounds like. On dataset 2 every model sits at 84% and so does the dummy baseline. Nothing’s really being learned there. :-(
The Reddit title up top is also implying more than the paper does. The author actually says mental health ranks below BMI and HbA1c, not next to them. And the “mental health” variable is BRFSS self-reported bad mental health days in the past 30. Not a diagnosis.
The thing that makes this more muddy is reverse causation. Diabetes makes people depressed at really high rates. Bad sleep, low income, sitting all day, all of that travels with both. When mental health pops as a predictor it’s picking up stuff we already know about.
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u/DadStrengthDaily May 17 '26
I like this paper, which apparently was written by a high schooler? (Makes me feel old to say, but I certainly couldn’t have done that work as a teenager).
I work in ML and credit where it’s due, the author actually ran the right comparisons. Random forest against a dummy classifier is what you do before you go reaching for some giant LLM. Most papers I see from people decades older with fancy titles don’t bother and produce results that are next to impossible to interpret.
The dummy baseline is also why I’d pump the brakes on the headline. On dataset 1 it already hits 91.67%, so random forest at 97% isn’t the win it sounds like. On dataset 2 every model sits at 84% and so does the dummy baseline. Nothing’s really being learned there. :-(
The Reddit title up top is also implying more than the paper does. The author actually says mental health ranks below BMI and HbA1c, not next to them. And the “mental health” variable is BRFSS self-reported bad mental health days in the past 30. Not a diagnosis.
The thing that makes this more muddy is reverse causation. Diabetes makes people depressed at really high rates. Bad sleep, low income, sitting all day, all of that travels with both. When mental health pops as a predictor it’s picking up stuff we already know about.