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Comment by lxnn

It's essentially when information that was used to identify the suspect is presented as confirmation of their guilt.

> The witness described a tall, white, black-haired man with a tattoo on his right ankle. Only .001% of the population match this description, so there is only a .001% chance that the suspect is innocent.

Of course, this ignores the fact that they compared the description against a database of one million people, among whom you would expect to find 10 coincidental matches.

For the same reason more data is required to select a model than to validate a model in machine learning.

parent lxnn 6 years ago

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