We propose new tools for policy-makers to use when assessing and correcting fairness and bias in AI algorithms. The three tools are:
- A new definition of fairness called "controlled fairness" with respect to choices of protected features and filters. The definition provides a simple test of fairness of an algorithm with respect to a dataset. This notion of fairness is suitable in cases where fairness is prioritized over accuracy, such as in cases where there is no "ground truth" data, only data labeled with past decisions (which may have been biased).
- Algorithms for retraining a given classifier to achieve "controlled fairness" with respect to a choice of features and filters. Two algorithms are presented, implemented and tested. These algorithms require training two different models in two stages. We experiment with combinations of various types of models for the first and second stage and report on which combinations perform best in terms of fairness and accuracy.
- Algorithms for adjusting model parameters to achieve a notion of fairness called "classification parity". This notion of fairness is suitable in cases where accuracy is prioritized. Two algorithms are presented, one which assumes that protected features are accessible to the model during testing, and one which assumes protected features are not accessible during testing.
We evaluate our tools on three different publicly available datasets. We find that the tools are useful for understanding various dimensions of bias, and that in practice the algorithms are effective in starkly reducing a given observed bias when tested on new data.
University of Bristol（布里斯托尔大学）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）
Today, artificial intelligence systems driven by machine learning algorithms can be in a position to take important, and sometimes legally binding, decisions about our everyday lives. In many cases, however, these systems and their actions are neither regulated nor certified. To help counter the potential harm that such algorithms can cause we developed an open source toolbox that can analyse selected fairness, accountability and transparency aspects of the machine learning process: data (and their features), models and predictions, allowing to automatically and objectively report them to rele…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；CognitiveScale
As artificial intelligence plays an increasingly important role in our society, there are ethical and moral obligations for both businesses and researchers to ensure that their machine learning models are designed, deployed, and maintained responsibly. These models need to be rigorously audited for fairness, robustness, transparency, and interpretability. A variety of methods have been developed that focus on these issues in isolation, however, managing these methods in conjunction with model development can be cumbersome and timeconsuming. In this paper, we introduce a unified and model-agnos…
Predictive systems, in particular machine learning algorithms, can take important, and sometimes legally binding, decisions about our everyday life. In most cases, however, these systems and decisions are neither regulated nor certified. Given the potential harm that these algorithms can cause, their qualities such as fairness, accountability and transparency (FAT) are of paramount importance. To ensure high-quality, fair, transparent and reliable predictive systems, we developed an open source Python package called FAT Forensics. It can inspect important fairness, accountability and transpare…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
An accountable algorithmic transparency report (ATR) should ideally investigate the (a) transparency of the underlying algorithm, and (b) fairness of the algorithmic decisions, and at the same time preserve data subjects' privacy. However, a provably formal study of the impact to data subjects' privacy caused by the utility of releasing an ATR (that investigates transparency and fairness), is yet to be addressed in the literature. The far-fetched benefit of such a study lies in the methodical characterization of privacy-utility trade-offs for release of ATRs in public, and their consequential …
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Automated decision systems (ADS) are increasingly used for consequential decision-making. These systems often rely on sophisticated yet opaque machine learning models, which do not allow for understanding how a given decision was arrived at. This is not only problematic from a legal perspective, but non-transparent systems are also prone to yield unfair outcomes because their sanity is challenging to assess and calibrate in the first place -- which is particularly worrisome for human decision-subjects. Based on this observation and building upon existing work, I aim to make the following three…
Joint Research Centre, European Commission（欧盟联合研究中心）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）
The Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning (FAT-ML) literature proposes a varied set of group fairness metrics to measure discrimination against socio-demographic groups that are characterized by a protected feature, such as gender or race.Such a system can be deemed as either fair or unfair depending on the choice of the metric. Several metrics have been proposed, some of them incompatible with each other.We do so empirically, by observing that several of these metrics cluster together in two or three main clusters for the same groups and machine learning methods. In a…
Testing autonomous vehicles and AI: perspectives and challenges from cybersecurity, transparency, robustness and fairness
European Commission, Joint Research Centre（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）；University of Alcalá（阿尔卡拉大学）；EPFL - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology（瑞士洛桑联邦理工学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；BASt - German Federal Highway Research Institute（德国联邦公路研究所）；Reed Mobility（里德移动公司）
Making fair decisions is crucial to ethically implementing machine learning algorithms in social settings. In this work, we consider the celebrated definition of counterfactual fairness [Kusner et al., NeurIPS, 2017]. We begin by showing that an algorithm which satisfies counterfactual fairness also satisfies demographic parity, a far simpler fairness constraint. Similarly, we show that all algorithms satisfying demographic parity can be trivially modified to satisfy counterfactual fairness. Together, our results indicate that counterfactual fairness is basically equivalent to demographic pari…
Machine learning algorithms are now frequently used in sensitive contexts that substantially affect the course of human lives, such as credit lending or criminal justice. This is driven by the idea that `objective' machines base their decisions solely on facts and remain unaffected by human cognitive biases, discriminatory tendencies or emotions. Yet, there is overwhelming evidence showing that algorithms can inherit or even perpetuate human biases in their decision making when they are based on data that contains biased human decisions. This has led to a call for fairness-aware machine learni…
audEERING GmbH（audEERING有限公司）；University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Imperial College（帝国理工学院）
Underspecification and fairness in machine learning (ML) applications have recently become two prominent issues in the ML community. Acoustic scene classification (ASC) applications have so far remained unaffected by this discussion, but are now becoming increasingly used in real-world systems where fairness and reliability are critical aspects. In this work, we argue for the need of a more holistic evaluation process for ASC models through disaggregated evaluations. This entails taking into account performance differences across several factors, such as city, location, and recording device. A…
Decision-making systems based on AI and machine learning have been used throughout a wide range of real-world scenarios, including healthcare, law enforcement, education, and finance. It is no longer far-fetched to envision a future where autonomous systems will be driving entire business decisions and, more broadly, supporting large-scale decision-making infrastructure to solve society's most challenging problems. Issues of unfairness and discrimination are pervasive when decisions are being made by humans, and remain (or are potentially amplified) when decisions are made using machines with …
With the current ongoing debate about fairness, explainability and transparency of machine learning models, their application in high-impact clinical decision-making systems must be scrutinized. We consider a real-life example of risk estimation before surgery and investigate the potential for bias or unfairness of a variety of algorithms. Our approach creates transparent documentation of potential bias so that the users can apply the model carefully. We augment a model-card like analysis using propensity scores with a decision-tree based guide for clinicians that would identify predictable sh…
The Explabox: Model-Agnostic Machine Learning Transparency & Analysis
Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）；National Police Lab AI（国家警察人工智能实验室）；Netherlands National Police（荷兰国家警察）；Tilburg University（蒂尔堡大学）；Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society（蒂尔堡法律、技术与社会研究所）
Transparency and Proportionality in Post-Processing Algorithmic Bias Correction
Data Science and Computational Intelligence Institute (DaSCI), University of Granada（数据科学与计算智能研究所（DaSCI）、格拉纳达大学）；Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen（信息科学与媒体研究系、卑尔根大学）；Data Science and Computational Intelligence Institute (DaSCI), Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (DCSAI), University of Granada（数据科学与计算智能研究所（DaSCI）、计算机科学与人工智能系（DCSAI）、格拉纳达大学）
Numerous Machine Learning (ML) bias-related failures in recent years have led to scrutiny of how companies incorporate aspects of transparency and accountability in their ML lifecycles. Companies have a responsibility to monitor ML processes for bias and mitigate any bias detected, ensure business product integrity, preserve customer loyalty, and protect brand image. Challenges specific to industry ML projects can be broadly categorized into principled documentation, human oversight, and need for mechanisms that enable information reuse and improve cost efficiency. We highlight specific roadbl…
Explanations as Bias Detectors: A Critical Study of Local Post-hoc XAI Methods for Fairness Exploration
University of Ioannina（伊奥安纳大学）；Archimedes / Athena RC Greece（阿基米德/亚特兰蒂斯研究所以及希腊）；Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学）；Universität der Bundeswehr München（联邦国防军大学慕尼黑）
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；University of Oklahoma（俄克拉荷马大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Scoring systems, as a type of predictive model, have significant advantages in interpretability and transparency and facilitate quick decision-making. As such, scoring systems have been extensively used in a wide variety of industries such as healthcare and criminal justice. However, the fairness issues in these models have long been criticized, and the use of big data and machine learning algorithms in the construction of scoring systems heightens this concern. In this paper, we propose a general framework to create fairness-aware, data-driven scoring systems. First, we develop a social welfa…
Motivated by mitigating potentially harmful impacts of technologies, the AI community has formulated and accepted mathematical definitions for certain pillars of accountability: e.g. privacy, fairness, and model transparency. Yet, we argue this is fundamentally misguided because these definitions are imperfect, siloed constructions of the human values they hope to proxy, while giving the guise that those values are sufficiently embedded in our technologies. Under popularized methods, tensions arise when practitioners attempt to achieve each pillar of fairness, privacy, and transparency in isol…
In recent years, discussions about fairness in machine learning, AI ethics and algorithm audits have increased. Many entities have developed framework guidance to establish a baseline rubric for fairness and accountability. However, in spite of increased discussions and multiple frameworks, algorithm and data auditing still remain difficult to execute in practice. Many open-source auditing tools are available, but users aren't always aware of the tools, what they are useful for, or how to access them. Model auditing and evaluation are not frequently emphasized skills in machine learning. There…
Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Needs, Techniques, Applications, and Future Direction
University of Gondar（贡德尔大学）；College of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs（科罗拉多大学科罗拉多斯普林斯分校工程与应用科学学院）；Can Tho University（芹苴大学）；Ewha Womans University（梨花女子大学）；University of Colorado, Colorado Springs（科罗拉多大学科罗拉多斯普林斯分校）
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Explaining deep learning models is of vital importance for understanding artificial intelligence systems, improving safety, and evaluating fairness. To better understand and control the CNN model, many methods for transparency-interpretability have been proposed. However, most of these works are less intuitive for human understanding and have insufficient human control over the CNN model. We propose a novel method, Transparent and Controllable Network Learning (TCNL), to overcome such challenges. Towards the goal of improving transparency-interpretability, in TCNL, we define some concepts for …
