Yesterday Simply Statistics linked to a paper with the provocative title Classifier Technology and the Illusion of Progress. I’ve only skimmed the article so far, but here are a few sentences that stood out.

In particular, simple methods typically yield performance almost as good as more sophisticated methods, to the extent that the difference in performance may be swamped by other sources of uncertainty that generally are not considered in the classical supervised classification paradigm. …

The situation to date thus appears to be one of very substantial theoretical progress … While all of these things are true, it is the contention of this paper that the practical impact of the developments has been inflated; that although progress has been made, it may well not be as great as has been suggested.