<p>There are a few topics on this site (unbalanced data, up-weighting, accuracy, F1 score, precision/recall etc) that whenever a user asks a question regarding one of these methods/metrics, a few high reputation users immediately ignore the question at hand and post copy pasted responses about how that method is bad. Usually the question has nothing to do with the merits of that method/metric and rather the implementation of it and so this response has nothing to do with the question actually being asked.</p>
<p>For example see <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/555136/class-imbalance-training-set-is-balanced-but-test-set-is-imbalanced-how-to-tra?noredirect=1#comment1020890_555136">Class imbalance: training set is balanced but test set is imbalanced, how to train?</a></p>
<p>The user asks about the implementation of training a model with under-sampled data and a user responds with 3 comments back to back about how imbalanced data isn't a problem (this is entirely unrelated as the asker was only under-sampling for computational reasons) and how accuracy/precision/recall etc shouldn't be used.</p>
<p>Again the user asked no questions about whether someone should use any of these methods; they simply asked if they were to use them how would they do it.</p>
<p>The responses by these users are spam. They detract from the actual question being asked and make new users feel frustrated when an honest question is answered with &quot;don't use that; it is bad&quot;.</p>
<p>I will add that all of the methods that these users dislike are widely used, in peer-reviewed papers, in statistical textbooks, across various internet sources. I am not saying that this means they are in fact valid, but I am also saying that a few guys here on cross validated agreeing that they are bad does not either make them invalid. Further the only proof offered against the validity of these methods are cross-validated posts written by the commenter (that have since been closed). If the user wants to discuss the merits of those methods then there are already questions for that.</p>
<p>Should comments/answers that answer something other than the question being asked be allowed?</p>
<p>See other examples here:</p>
<p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/553225/model-accuracy-versus-f1?noredirect=1#comment1017137_553225">Model accuracy versus F1</a></p>
<p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/549800/is-it-appropriate-to-use-npv-and-ppv-when-performing-undersampling?noredirect=1#comment1010255_549800">Is it appropriate to use NPV and PPV when performing undersampling?</a></p>
<p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/425716/reporting-f1-scores/426815#426815">Reporting F1 Scores</a></p>
<p>These are just a few examples, I am sure there are others</p>
