EthicML 0.1.0a3

A toolkit for understanding and researching algorithmic bias

EthicML

EthicML exists to combat the problems we've found with off-the-shelf fairness comparison packages.

These other packages are useful, but given that we primarily do research, a lot of the work we do doesn't fit into some nice box. For example, we might want to use a 'fair' pre-processing method on the data before training a classifier on it. We may still be experimenting and only want part of the framework to execute, or we may want to do hyper-parameter optimization. Whilst other frameworks can be modified to do these tasks, you end up with hacked-together approaches that don't lend themselves to be built on in the future. Because of this, we're drawing a line in the sand with some of the other frameworks we've used and building our own.

Why not use XXX?

There are an increasing number of other options, IBM's fair-360, Aequitas, EthicalML/XAI, Fairness-Comparison and others. They're all great at what they do, they're just not right for us. We will however be influenced by them.

Design Principles

The Triplet

Given that we're considering fairness, the base of the toolbox is the triplet {x, s, y}

• X - Features
• S - Sensitive Label
• Y - Class Label

All methods must assume S and Y are multi-class.

We use a named tuple to contain the triplet

triplet = DataTuple(x=dataframe, s=dataframe, y=dataframe)

The dataframe may be a little innefficient, but given the amount of splicing on conditions that we're doing it feels worth it.

Separation of Methods

We purposefully keep pre, during and post algorithm methods separate. This is because they have different return types.

pre_algorithm.run(train: DataTuple, test: DataTuple)  # -> Tuple[pandas.DataFrame, pandas.DataFrame]
in_algorithm.run(train: DataTuple, test: DataTuple)  # -> pandas.DataFrame
post_algorithm.run(preds: DataFrame, test: DataTuple)  # -> pandas.DataFrame

where preds is a one column dataframe with the column name 'preds'.

General Rules of Thumb

• Mutable data structures are bad.
• At the very least, functions should be Typed.
• Readability > Efficiency
• Don't get around warnings by just turning them off.

Future Plans

Hopefully EthicML becomes a super easy way to look at the biases in different datasets and get a comparison of different models.