222 research outputs found
Racial categories in machine learning
Controversies around race and machine learning have sparked debate among
computer scientists over how to design machine learning systems that guarantee
fairness. These debates rarely engage with how racial identity is embedded in
our social experience, making for sociological and psychological complexity.
This complexity challenges the paradigm of considering fairness to be a formal
property of supervised learning with respect to protected personal attributes.
Racial identity is not simply a personal subjective quality. For people labeled
"Black" it is an ascribed political category that has consequences for social
differentiation embedded in systemic patterns of social inequality achieved
through both social and spatial segregation. In the United States, racial
classification can best be understood as a system of inherently unequal status
categories that places whites as the most privileged category while signifying
the Negro/black category as stigmatized. Social stigma is reinforced through
the unequal distribution of societal rewards and goods along racial lines that
is reinforced by state, corporate, and civic institutions and practices. This
creates a dilemma for society and designers: be blind to racial group
disparities and thereby reify racialized social inequality by no longer
measuring systemic inequality, or be conscious of racial categories in a way
that itself reifies race. We propose a third option. By preceding group
fairness interventions with unsupervised learning to dynamically detect
patterns of segregation, machine learning systems can mitigate the root cause
of social disparities, social segregation and stratification, without further
anchoring status categories of disadvantage
Learning Tasks for Multitask Learning: Heterogenous Patient Populations in the ICU
Machine learning approaches have been effective in predicting adverse
outcomes in different clinical settings. These models are often developed and
evaluated on datasets with heterogeneous patient populations. However, good
predictive performance on the aggregate population does not imply good
performance for specific groups.
In this work, we present a two-step framework to 1) learn relevant patient
subgroups, and 2) predict an outcome for separate patient populations in a
multi-task framework, where each population is a separate task. We demonstrate
how to discover relevant groups in an unsupervised way with a
sequence-to-sequence autoencoder. We show that using these groups in a
multi-task framework leads to better predictive performance of in-hospital
mortality both across groups and overall. We also highlight the need for more
granular evaluation of performance when dealing with heterogeneous populations.Comment: KDD 201
Demographic Bias: A Challenge for Fingervein Recognition Systems?
Recently, concerns regarding potential biases in the underlying algorithms of
many automated systems (including biometrics) have been raised. In this
context, a biased algorithm produces statistically different outcomes for
different groups of individuals based on certain (often protected by
anti-discrimination legislation) attributes such as sex and age. While several
preliminary studies investigating this matter for facial recognition algorithms
do exist, said topic has not yet been addressed for vascular biometric
characteristics. Accordingly, in this paper, several popular types of
recognition algorithms are benchmarked to ascertain the matter for fingervein
recognition. The experimental evaluation suggests lack of bias for the tested
algorithms, although future works with larger datasets are needed to validate
and confirm those preliminary results.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 8 tables. Submitted to European Signal Processing
Conference (EUSIPCO) -- special session on bias in biometric
Uncovering and Mitigating Algorithmic Bias through Learned Latent Structure
Recent research has highlighted the vulnerabilities of modern machine learning based systems to bias, especially for segments of society that are under-represented in training data. In this work, we develop a novel, tunable algorithm for mitigating the hidden, and potentially unknown, biases within training data. Our algorithm fuses the original learning task with a
variational autoencoder to learn the latent structure within the dataset and then adaptively uses the learned latent distributions to re-weight the importance of certain data points while training. While our method is generalizable across various data modalities and learning tasks, in this work we use our algorithm to address the issue of racial and gender bias in facial
detection systems. We evaluate our algorithm on the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark (PPB), a dataset specifically designed to evaluate biases in computer vision systems, and demonstrate increased overall performance as well as decreased categorical bias with our debiasing approach
A Moral Framework for Understanding Fair {ML} through Economic Models of Equality of Opportunity
Dancing to the Partisan Beat: A First Analysis of Political Communication on TikTok
TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service, whose popularity is
increasing rapidly. It was the world's second-most downloaded app in 2019.
Although the platform is known for having users posting videos of themselves
dancing, lip-syncing, or showcasing other talents, user-videos expressing
political views have seen a recent spurt. This study aims to perform a primary
evaluation of political communication on TikTok. We collect a set of US
partisan Republican and Democratic videos to investigate how users communicated
with each other about political issues. With the help of computer vision,
natural language processing, and statistical tools, we illustrate that
political communication on TikTok is much more interactive in comparison to
other social media platforms, with users combining multiple information
channels to spread their messages. We show that political communication takes
place in the form of communication trees since users generate branches of
responses to existing content. In terms of user demographics, we find that
users belonging to both the US parties are young and behave similarly on the
platform. However, Republican users generated more political content and their
videos received more responses; on the other hand, Democratic users engaged
significantly more in cross-partisan discussions.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at the 12th International ACM Web Science
Conference (WebSci 2020). Please cite the WebSci version; Second version
includes corrected typo
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