Classification Result Error
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by
trouille
scientist, moderator, admin
Hi all,
I just returned from the .Astronomy conference in Boston and am catching up on the week in Quench.
And I'm happy to begin with a BIG THANK YOU ZUTOPIAN AND OTHERS! Yes, there's definitely an error in the classification scheme. We've looked into the details and it's actually quite interesting.
For zutopian's initial example (http://quench.galaxyzoo.org/#/examine/AGS0000022), If we break down how many votes went to each category, we get: 3 people said it was a merger, 5 tidal debris, 7 neither, and 5 both. Therefore, Tools lists 'Neither' because that's the category that gets the most votes.
So, the data reflects what we told it to do. In this case, though, the most common answer is misleading; 13/20 people thought there was SOME kind of merging going on in the galaxies (merger, tidal debris, or both), and so this really should go into the "merger" side of the classifications.
When we set the rule for how Tools would list final classifications, we didn't think of the cases where more people would directly vote for 'Neither', but if you add up 'merger + tidal debris + both', you could get more votes than 'Neither'.
So we've learned that we need to change our algorithm for how we set the final classification result.
It's AWESOME that you all identified this mistake and wrote about it.
But I realize that for some, this experience may feel quite frustrating. But please please remember that this is a major part of science and being in a science team. Double checking and revising and moving forward. Science is both big picture and detail oriented. Science teams do best when there's a mix of people with a mix of skills on both ends of that spectrum. So lucky that our team has that!!
And by 'we', I mean Mike Zevin and Kyle Willett looked into the details and figured out what was going wrong. Thank you Zooites + Science Team!!
Posted
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by
zutopian
I replied in following disussion, where above post is also.:
http://quenchtalk.galaxyzoo.org/#/boards/BGS0000008/discussions/DGS0000203?page=2&comment_id=523e155d4f6fda6f420001b7Posted
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by
zutopian
Merging Classification Problem Fixed! Quench Boost 4 take 2.
Posted