Title: The Theory is Predictive, but is it Complete? An Application to Human Perception of Randomness,
Abstract: When we test a theory using data, it is common to focus on correctness: do
the predictions of the theory match what we see in the data? But we also care
about completeness: how much of the predictable variation in the data is
captured by the theory? This question is difficult to answer, because in
general we do not know how much "predictable variation" there is in the
problem. In this paper, we consider approaches motivated by machine learning
algorithms as a means of constructing a benchmark for the best attainable level
of prediction.
We illustrate our methods on the task of predicting human-generated random
sequences. Relative to an atheoretical machine learning algorithm benchmark, we
find that existing behavioral models explain roughly 15 percent of the
predictable variation in this problem. This fraction is robust across several
variations on the problem. We also consider a version of this approach for
analyzing field data from domains in which human perception and generation of
randomness has been used as a conceptual framework; these include sequential
decision-making and repeated zero-sum games. In these domains, our framework
for testing the completeness of theories provides a way of assessing their
effectiveness over different contexts; we find that despite some differences,
the existing theories are fairly stable across our field domains in their
performance relative to the benchmark. Overall, our results indicate that (i)
there is a significant amount of structure in this problem that existing models
have yet to capture and (ii) there are rich domains in which machine learning
may provide a viable approach to testing completeness.