December 23, 2019

Asking the wrong questions at SE.AI

A new question was posted today to the SE.AI forum, which is about a machine learning problem in Python:

https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/17226/split-data-for-training-and-validation-keeping-grouped-data-together

On the first look, the OP looks great. SImilar to the guidelines in Stackoverflow, it's a minimal example and a code snippet is also included. This allows the SE.AI Community to reproduce the problem and provide high quality answer. The problem is, that a closer look will show, that the question has a low quality. RIght now, no comment was written but the probability is high, that the forum will critize the question as well.

The problem is, that AI related questions are different from programming question. In case of Artificial Intelligence the problem is not how to create a Python script, but how to create an academic paper. That means, instead of including sourcecode into the question, the better idea is to include academic references to existing papers. Artificial Intelligence is grounded in the science, and science communication works with citing each other.

Even if the wrong papers are cited, it makes a good first impression if somebody shows, that he is familiar with the bibtex / Endnote tool already. Instead of reveal all the tricks how to forumulate a good question, let us wait a bit and observe, what the SE.AI community is doing in this case.