How to Upgrade Judges with Machine Learning

When should a criminal defendant be required to await trial in jail rather than at home? Software could significantly improve judges' ability to make that call--reducing crime or the number of people stuck waiting in jail. In a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists and computer scientists trained an algorithm to predict whether defendants were a flight risk from their rap sheet and court records using data from hundreds of thousands of cases in New York City. When tested on over a hundred thousand more cases that it hadn't seen before, the algorithm proved better at predicting what defendants will do after release than judges. Jon Kleinberg, a computer science professor at Cornell involved in the research, says one goal of the project was to show policymakers the potential benefits to society of using machine learning in the criminal justice system.