Publishing in a field that I am not an expert in

Question

To give you some backstory, there is a particular publically-available hospital dataset that has been published about by other groups. I have recently come up with a novel machine learning method for predictive modeling within the dataset, and it is here where I am not sure where to go.

I believe that what I have is novel and significant enough to publish a paper about. However, I have more of a clinical/biology background and no formal background in machine learning. What would be the best way to go about the publication process here? I'm fairly certain in my ability to write the whole paper, but I am somewhat worried that there may be a technical mistake that may not be apparent at first glance. I'm also not even sure who is an "expert" that I could contact about this.

Any guidance is appreciated!

Answer 1

I agree with the consensus in the comments: you really should try to collaborate with an expert in Machine Learning (or, as I would really recommend, in statistics, but I'm biased).

On the one hand, as Christian Hennig writes, there is quite a chance that you rediscovered something that is well known in the field, probably under some name you simply don't know - either as something that works, or as something that doesn't. That in itself does not mean you don't have something publishable, you might certainly be able to contribute something like a new application, or offer a new variation on an existing tool. However, you really need to speak the ML language. Reviewers will not like it if you propose something they already know; it will look like you didn't do your homework. ("Doing your homework" is pretty much what we are recommending here.)

On the other hand, an ML/stats expert will be able to suggest venues for publication, write the paper in a way that is commonly accepted in this field, request useful reviewers, and so forth.

So your question is really how to go about finding such an expert who is willing to collaborate with you. And that is a different question. We might already have something on that here at Academia.SE, try searching. How you go about this will depend heavily on your situation, on whether you are a student (how far along?), or an established researchers, whether you are at a university or at some other institution, or a private researcher, whether you are a member of some professional association that might have a ML/stats interest group, and so forth.