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Fairly Certain: Using Uncertainty in Predictions to Diagnose Roots of Unfairness

One conventional definition of group fairness is that the ML algorithms produce predictions where the FPR (or FNR or both) is the same across groups. Fixating on equating FPR etc. can harm the very groups we are trying to help. So it may be useful to rethink how to solve

Optimal Data Collection When Strata and Strata Variances Are Known

With Ken Cor. What’s the least amount of data you need to collect to estimate the population mean with a particular standard error? For the simplest case—estimating the mean of a binomial variable using simple random sampling, a conservative estimate of the variance (p=.5), and a ±3

Equilibrium Fairness: How Fair Algorithms Can Hurt Those They Purport to Help

One definition of a fair algorithm is an algorithm that yields the same FPR across groups (an example of classification parity). To achieve that, we often have to trade in some accuracy. The final model is thus less accurate but fair. There are two concerns with such models: 1. Net

No Stopping: Impact of the Stopping Rule on the Sex Ratio

For social scientists brought up to worry about bias stemming from stopping data collection when results look significant, the fact that a gender based stopping rule has no impact on the sex ratio seems suspect. So let’s dig deeper. Let there be n families and let the stopping rule

ML (O)Ops: What Data To Collect? (part 3)

The first part of the series, “Improving and Deploying On-Device Models With Confidence,” is posted here. The second part, “Keeping Track of Changes,” is posted here. With Atul Dhingra For a broad class of machine learning problems, nitpicking over the neural net architecture is over (see, for instance, here). Instead,

Market Welfare: Why Are Covid-19 Vaccines Still Underfunded?

“To get roughly 70% of the planet’s population inoculated by April, the IMF calculates, would cost just $50bn. The cumulative economic benefit by 2025, in terms of increased global output, would be $9trn, to say nothing of the many lives that would be saved.” https://www.economist.com/leaders/

The Story of Science: Storytelling Bias in Science

Often enough, scientists are left with the unenviable task of conducting an orchestra with out-of-tune instruments. They are charged with telling a coherent story about noisy results. Scientists defer to the demand partly because there is a widespread belief that a journal article is the appropriate grouping variable at which

The True Ones: Best Guess of True Proportion of 1s

ML models are generally used to make predictions about individual observations. Sometimes, however, the business decision is based on aggregate data. For example, say a company sells pants and wants to know how many will be returned over a certain period. Say the company has an ML model that predicts