What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Algorithm ? (2024)

FAQs

What are the advantages and disadvantages of an algorithm? ›

Advantages of algorithms include that they are comprehensive and guarantee the correct solution; disadvantages include that they may be time-consuming and require too much mental effort.

Black-box decision-making: AI algorithms can be difficult to understand and interpret, making it challenging to know how decisions are made and identify potential issues. Over reliance: There is a risk of over-reliance on AI algorithms, leading to complacency and reduced human oversight and judgment.

They simplify complex problems, ensuring consistent solutions and optimising the process by saving time and resources. Algorithms are versatile, usable across different problems and programming environments, making them a universal tool in computer science.

In practice, however, news reports and research have shown these algorithms are prone to some alarming errors. And their decisions can have adverse and long-lasting consequences in people's lives.

Incomplete or unrepresentative training data

If the data used to train the algorithm are more representative of some groups of people than others, the predictions from the model may also be systematically worse for unrepresented or under-representative groups.

Disadvantages of algorithm

More difficult to debug as compared to the flowchart as the steps are similar to writing the final code. Difficult to show branching and looping. It is time-consuming to write the Pseudocode for big problems.

The advantages of the A* algorithm include simplicity and effectiveness in path planning. The disadvantages are the difficulty in determining the heuristic function and the need for optimization.

What are algorithmic risks? Algorithm design is vulnerable to risks, such as biased logic, flawed assumptions or judgments, inappropriate modeling techniques, coding errors, and identifying spurious patterns in the training data.

What is the biggest drawback of algorithms? ›

The major drawback of algorithms is that they can lead to faulty solutions. Algorithms are step-by-step procedures that provide a systematic approach to solving a problem, but they are developed by humans and are subject to errors. Even a small mistake in the algorithm can lead to incorrect results or faulty solutions.

Advantages of Algorithms:

It is easy to understand. An algorithm is a step-wise representation of a solution to a given problem. In an Algorithm the problem is broken down into smaller pieces or steps hence, it is easier for the programmer to convert it into an actual program.

In most cases, this approach is useful is it increases speed and efficiency when making decisions. However, it can prove to be harmful when these algorithms start to make discriminatory decisions towards certain groups, such as people of color, women, and low-income communities.

It broadens their mind to additional capabilities of a particular solution and helps them see a problem more holistically instead of “mark the right answer on a test” black or white. It also allows them to be more creative with the solution.

The advantages of the A* algorithm include simplicity and effectiveness in path planning. The disadvantages are the difficulty in determining the heuristic function and the need for optimization.

Advantages: Effective in high dimensional spaces and uses a subset of training points in the decision function so it is also memory efficient. Disadvantages: The algorithm does not directly provide probability estimates, these are calculated using an expensive five-fold cross-validation.

Pros and Cons of Boosting

Boosting is a resilient method that curbs over-fitting easily. One disadvantage of boosting is that it is sensitive to outliers since every classifier is obliged to fix the errors in the predecessors. Thus, the method is too dependent on outliers.