It always surprised me to see them reporting results to a 10th of a percent precision (e.g. "2.3%"). I'd assumed that the best they could do on an individual was a couple of orders of magnitude less precise (e.g. 10%, 20%)
The method may be good, but the 86% is very suspicious. For this kind of thing I'd be happy if they can show more than a half accuracy, or 3/4, but 86% looks too precise to be a real number.
It's more likely he just rounded a number of results and rounded to the first decimal place to display it better, not to suggest some level of accuracy.
Reducing error by 25% from a 96.5% baseline gives you their stated 97.25% accuracy. About 0.75% fewer errors. Still amazing, but less impressive than the abstract makes it sound.
There's no false precision. There's a whopping +/- 40% error bar! What can be said is that 26% is at least less precise on average. You've added a completely arbitrary 0.32 because of some obsession with decimals.
What do you mean with accuracy here?
Usually 50% accuracy means cointoss, meaning 20% accuracy is equal to 80% accuracy, which is better than the article's 78% and not that far from 90%.
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