Bulletin: Prediction of human behaviour: Can an algorithm predict human behavior faster and more reliably than humans? Centre of Criminology Library at the University of Toronto points to an MIT study which provides a solution to this thorny - but topical- conundrum.

"Max Kanter, a master’s student in computer science at MIT, and his advisor, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, a research scientist at MIT’s computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory, created the Data Science Machine to search for patterns and choose which variables are the most relevant. Their paper on the project results (pdf) will be presented at the IEEE Data Science and Advanced Analytics conference in Paris this week. It’s fairly common for machines to analyze data, but humans are typically required to choose which data points are relevant for analysis. In three competitions with human teams, a machine made more accurate predictions than 615 of 906 human teams. And while humans worked on their predictive algorithms for months, the machine took two to 12 hours to produce each of its competition entries."
http://crimbrary.blogspot.ca/2015/10/an-algorithm-can-predict-human-behavior.html