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Rules vs model bake-off: measuring when learned models actually earn their complexity
A machine learning model achieves 77.5% accuracy. A handful of hand-written rules achieves 76.0%. The model wins the benchmark.
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Ship the rule-based baseline first: why 20 lines of if/else gate every good ML project
When people start an ML project, the instinct is often to train a model immediately. Open a notebook, split the data, fit a classifier, and compare metrics.