Visual analysis of discrimination in machine learning

The growing use of automated decision-making in critical applications, such as crime prediction and college admission, has raised questions about fairness in machine learning. How can we decide whether different treatments are reasonable or discriminatory? In this paper, we investigate discrimination in machine learning from a visual analytics perspective and propose an interactive visualization tool, DiscriLens, to support a more comprehensive analysis. To reveal detailed information on algorithmic discrimination, DiscriLens identifies a collection of potentially discriminatory itemsets based on causal modeling and classification rules mining. By combining an extended Euler diagram with a matrix-based visualization, we develop a novel set visualization to facilitate the exploration and interpretation of discriminatory itemsets. A user study shows that users can interpret the visually encoded information in DiscriLens quickly and accurately. Use cases demonstrate that DiscriLens provides informative guidance in understanding and reducing algorithmic discrimination

The Grammar of Interactive Explanatory Model Analysis

The growing need for in-depth analysis of predictive models leads to a series of new methods for explaining their local and global properties. Which of these methods is the best? It turns out that this is an ill-posed question. One cannot sufficiently explain a black-box machine learning model using a single method that gives only one perspective. Isolated explanations are prone to misunderstanding, which inevitably leads to wrong or simplistic reasoning. This problem is known as the Rashomon effect and refers to diverse, even contradictory interpretations of the same phenomenon. Surprisingly, the majority of methods developed for explainable machine learning focus on a single aspect of the model behavior. In contrast, we showcase the problem of explainability as an interactive and sequential analysis of a model. This paper presents how different Explanatory Model Analysis (EMA) methods complement each other and why it is essential to juxtapose them together. The introduced process of Interactive EMA (IEMA) derives from the algorithmic side of explainable machine learning and aims to embrace ideas developed in cognitive sciences. We formalize the grammar of IEMA to describe potential human-model dialogues. IEMA is implemented in the human-centered framework that adopts interactivity, customizability and automation as its main traits. Combined, these methods enhance the responsible approach to predictive modeling.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, 3 table

Individual Fairness Guarantee in Learning with Censorship

Algorithmic fairness, studying how to make machine learning (ML) algorithms fair, is an established area of ML. As ML technologies expand their application domains, including ones with high societal impact, it becomes essential to take fairness into consideration when building ML systems. Yet, despite its wide range of socially sensitive applications, most work treats the issue of algorithmic bias as an intrinsic property of supervised learning, i.e., the class label is given as a precondition. Unlike prior fairness work, we study individual fairness in learning with censorship where the assumption of availability of the class label does not hold, while still requiring that similar individuals are treated similarly. We argue that this perspective represents a more realistic model of fairness research for real-world application deployment, and show how learning with such a relaxed precondition draws new insights that better explain algorithmic fairness. We also thoroughly evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology on three real-world datasets, and validate its superior performance in minimizing discrimination while maintaining predictive performance

Algorithmic Fairness from a Non-ideal Perspective

Inspired by recent breakthroughs in predictive modeling, practitioners in both industry and government have turned to machine learning with hopes of operationalizing predictions to drive automated decisions. Unfortunately, many social desiderata concerning consequential decisions, such as justice or fairness, have no natural formulation within a purely predictive framework. In efforts to mitigate these problems, researchers have proposed a variety of metrics for quantifying deviations from various statistical parities that we might expect to observe in a fair world and offered a variety of algorithms in attempts to satisfy subsets of these parities or to trade o the degree to which they are satised against utility. In this paper, we connect this approach to fair machine learning to the literature on ideal and non-ideal methodological approaches in political philosophy. The ideal approach requires positing the principles according to which a just world would operate. In the most straightforward application of ideal theory, one supports a proposed policy by arguing that it closes a discrepancy between the real and the perfectly just world. However, by failing to account for the mechanisms by which our non-ideal world arose, the responsibilities of various decision-makers, and the impacts of proposed policies, naive applications of ideal thinking can lead to misguided interventions. In this paper, we demonstrate a connection between the fair machine learning literature and the ideal approach in political philosophy, and argue that the increasingly apparent shortcomings of proposed fair machine learning algorithms reflect broader troubles faced by the ideal approach. We conclude with a critical discussion of the harms of misguided solutions, a reinterpretation of impossibility results, and directions for future researc