Reverse Machine Learning

Eugen G Tarnow  January 29 2018 12:10:21 PM

I have coined the term "reverse machine learning" earlier in this blog.  The latest example comes from an incorrect meter reading by PSE&G, the electrical utility for our office.  

The person who came out misread the meter and we go a huge bill, 70 times larger than it should have been.

I figured that their computer system just does not catch the problem (their programmers are just stupid?)  and their human labor is not properly supervised.

I decided to test it.  I tried to enter a correct meter reading, which would be considerably lower than the previous human meter reading.  That did not work.  I got an error message:



In other words, the PSEG computer system presumably (with that error message - who knows?) insists on a higher meter reading than the last reading if I read the meter but on purpose lets the outlier meter reading of their employee pass.

Is this fraud on the part of PSEG? Who knows.  But it certainly is reverse machine learning - the computer knows something we do not and refuses to tell us what.



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