Complexity v Simplicity, the winner is?

I recently published a letter with the above title in the journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics; unfortunately it’s behind a paywall so I will briefly take you through the key point raised. The letter describes a specific prediction problem around drug induced cardiac toxicity mentioned in a previous blog entry (Mathematical models for ion-channel cardiac toxicity: David v Goliath). In short what we show in the letter is that a simple model using subtraction and addition (pre-school Mathematics) performs just as well for a given prediction problem as a multi-model approach using three large-scale models consisting of 100s of differential equations combined with machine learning approach (University level Mathematics and Computation)! The addition/subtraction model gave a ROC AUC of 0.97 which is very similar to multi-model/machine learning approach which gave a ROC AUC of 0.96. More detail on the analysis can be found on slides 17 and 18 within this presentation, A simple model for ion-channel related cardiac toxicity, which was given at an NC3Rs meeting.

The result described in the letter and presentation continues to add weight within that field that simple models are performing just as well as complex approaches for a given prediction task.