By Clare McGrane
For the past year, Amazon has been cracking down on sellers and third parties offering money for positive reviews. But for one team of data scientists, negative reviews on Amazon are much more interesting than positive ones.
Researchers from the University of Washington’s Data Science for Social Good program have set out to harness Amazon reviews to predict food product recalls. The team has developed a machine learning platform that can mine the text of Amazon reviews to make predictions about the safety of products. While the program is still in progress, it has the potential to revolutionize the process of food recalls.
Elaine Nsoesie, the team’s project lead and an assistant professor of global health at the UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said the current recall process can be incredibly slow.
“Some of [the cases] were as long as one year, from the time we saw someone write a review saying ‘there is something wrong with this product’ to the time the FDA actually issued a recall,” she said.
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