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But how do you de-bias that datasets when the world itself is biased? You can't just ignore that bias in the real world because any ML will at best mirror that
by slg 6y ago
But how do you de-bias that datasets when the world itself is biased? You can't just ignore that bias in the real world because any ML will at best mirror that bias if not amplify it.
For example imagine some ML algorithm that predicts the potential value of a customer (or their likelihood to steal from you) as they walk in the door of your business. How do you remove the racial bias from a system like that when racial biases exist in society that result in the average White person being in a higher socioeconomic class than the average Black person? The ML algorithm will tell you White customers are more valuable than Black customers. It is doing exactly what you told it to do, but the end result is that Black people get worse service in your business.
- karpierz 6y agoYou're talking about a different problem than the original thread. The original thread isn't saying "the underlying world is biased"; Obama's face exists in the world. It's saying that the dataset isn't reflective of the world, and this is an issue because then you'll end up with voice tools[1], facial recognition software[2], and sentencing algorithms[3] end up performing disproportionately poorly on some minority groups. And this ends up reinforcing the poor positions many people are already in. 1) https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7684 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7684 2) http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html?mod=article_inline http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html?mod=arti... 3) https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/big.2016.0047 https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/big.2016.0047
- slg 6y agoThe way I understood his original tweet was that he was taking the specific problem with this study to illustrate a point about ML overall. Therefore the criticism he receives can be related to how that idea applies to ML overall and not exclusively this problem.
- im3w1l 6y agoHow else are you going to solve it, if not one issue at a time? Or do people just want to rant without being interrupted by solutions?