🔬 Science 12h ago · Science Blog Editorial Team

A divorce-prediction equation was 90 percent accurate on the data it was built from, but when it flagged a couple as heading for divorce in a fresh sample it was right only 29 percent of the time, which is the trouble with rules like these

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The authority behind almost every list of relationship rules traces back to the same place: a body of observational research on couples that produced widely repeated claims about predicting divorce with better than 90 percent accuracy. The rules feel solid because that number sits underneath them.
The number deserves a closer look, and two papers have given it one.
What a 90 percent accuracy figure actually describes
Accuracy in this context means the proportion of couples a statistical model so

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