by Paige Park. Our capacity to accurately predict social outcomes is increasing. Deep neural networks and artificial intelligence are crucial technologies pushing this progress along. As these tools reshape how social prediction is done, social scientists should feel comfortable engaging with them and meaningfully contributing to the conversation. But many social scientists are still unfamiliar with and sometimes even skeptical of deep learning. This tutorial is designed to help close that knowledge gap. We’ll walk step-by-step through training a simple neural network for a social prediction task: forecasting population-level mortality rates.
