I agree that all data should be saved, and that there’s much more information in 100,000 50%-confidence predictions than in a dozen 95%-confidence predictions. But ask a biologist which they’d prefer (ETA: I have actually done this, more or less) and they’ll take the dozen 95%-confidence predictions, because they’re just going to turn around and use bog-standard low-throughput experimental techniques to dig deeper. From the biologists’ decision theory perspective, false positives are a lot more costly than false negatives.
That approach only works because yeast has been subjected to intense investigation by low-throughput techniques, providing a huge knowledge base that constrains and guides the automated investigation. (It also helps that yeast doesn’t do alternative splicing.) So it’s not so much “replacing” as “building upon”.
I agree that all data should be saved, and that there’s much more information in 100,000 50%-confidence predictions than in a dozen 95%-confidence predictions. But ask a biologist which they’d prefer (ETA: I have actually done this, more or less) and they’ll take the dozen 95%-confidence predictions, because they’re just going to turn around and use bog-standard low-throughput experimental techniques to dig deeper. From the biologists’ decision theory perspective, false positives are a lot more costly than false negatives.
That’s why we need to replace biologists with robots. Like this one.
That approach only works because yeast has been subjected to intense investigation by low-throughput techniques, providing a huge knowledge base that constrains and guides the automated investigation. (It also helps that yeast doesn’t do alternative splicing.) So it’s not so much “replacing” as “building upon”.