From Hume to Wuhan: An Epistemological Journey on the Problem of Induction in COVID-19 Machine Learning Models and its Impact upon Medical Research

Abstract

Advances in computer science have transformed the way artificial intelligence is employed in academia, with Machine Learning (ML) methods easily available to researchers from diverse areas thanks to intuitive frameworks that yield extraordinary results. Notwithstanding, current trends in the mainstream ML community tend to emphasise wins over knowledge, putting the scientific method aside, and focusing on maximising metrics of interest. Methodological flaws lead to poor justification of method choice, which in turn leads to disregard the limitations of the methods employed, ultimately putting at risk the translation of solutions into real-world clinical settings. This work exemplifies the impact of the problem of induction in medical research, studying the methodological issues of recent solutions for computer-aided diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest X-Ray images.