Fat Or Not: Toward ‘Proper Training of DL Models’

16 Nov

A new paper introduces a DL model to enable ‘computer aided diagnosis of obesity.’ Some concerns:

  1. Better baselines: BMI is easy to calculate and it would be useful to compare the results to BMI.
  2. Incorrect statement: The authors write: “the data partition in all the image sets are balanced with 50 % normal classes and 50 % obese classes for proper training of the deep learning models.” (This ought not to affect the results reported in the paper.)
  3. Ignoring Within Person Correlation: The paper uses data from 100 people (50 fat, 50 healthy) and takes 647 images of them (310 obese). It then uses data augmentation to expand the dataset to 2.7k images. But in doing the train/test split, there is no mention of splitting by people, which is the right thing to do.

    Start with the fact that you won’t see the people in your training data again when you put the model in production. If you don’t split train/test by people, it means that the images of the people in the training set are also in the test set. This means that the test set accuracy is likely higher than if you would run it on a fresh sample.