PyData is famous for it’s great talks on machine learning topics. This 2019 London edition, Vincent Warmerdam again managed to give a super inspiring presentation. This year he covers what he dubs Artificial Stupidity™. You should definitely watch the talk, which includes some great visual aids, but here are my main takeaways:

Vincent speaks of Artificial Stupidity, of machine learning gone HorriblyWrong™ — an example of which below — for which Vincent elaborates on three potential fixes:

1. Predict Less, but Carefully

Vincent argues you shouldn’t extrapolate your predictions outside of your observed sampling space. Even better: “Not predicting given uncertainty is a great idea.” As an alternative, we could for instance design a fallback mechanism, by including an outlier detection model as the first step of your machine learning model pipeline and only predict for non-outliers.

I definately recommend you watch this specific section of Vincent’s talk because he gives some very visual and intuitive explanations of how extrapolation may go HorriblyWrong™.

Be careful! One thing we should maybe start talking about to our bosses: Algorithms merely automate, approximate, and interpolate. It’s the extrapolation that is actually kind of dangerous.

Vincent Warmerdam @ Pydata 2019 London

Basically, we can choose to not make automated decisions sometimes.

2. Constrain thy Features

What we feed to our models really matters. […] You should probably do something to the data going into your model if you want your model to have any sort of fairness garantuees.

Vincent Warmerdam @ Pydata 2019 London

Often, simply removing biased features from your data does not reduce bias to the extent we may have hoped. Fortunately, Vincent demonstrates how to remove biased information from your variables by applying some cool math tricks.

Unfortunately, doing so will often result in a lesser predictive accuracy. Unsurprisingly though, as you are not closely fitting the biased data any more. What makes matters more problematic, Vincent rightfully mentions, is that corporate incentives often not really align here. It might feel that you need to pick: it’s either more accuracy or it’s more fairness.

However, there’s a nice solution that builds on point 1. We can now take the highly accurate model and the highly fair model, make predictions with both, and when these predictions differ, that’s a very good proxy where you potentially don’t want to make a prediction. Hence, there may be observations/samples where we are comfortable in making a fair prediction, whereas in most other situations we may say “right, this prediction seems unfair, we need a fallback mechanism, a human being should look at this and we should not automate this decision”.

Vincent does not that this is only one trick to constrain your model for fairness, and that fairness may often only be fair in the eyes of the beholder. Moreover, in order to correct for these biases and unfairness, you need to know about these unfair biases. Although outside of the scope of this specific topic, Vincent proposes this introduces new ethical issues:

Basically, we can choose to put our models on a controlled diet.

3. Constrain thy Model

Vincent argues that we should include constraints (based on domain knowledge, or common sense) into our models. In his presentation, he names a few. For instance, monotonicity, which implies that the relationship between X and Y should always be either entirely non-increasing, or entirely non-decreasing. Incorporating the previously discussed fairness principles would be a second example, and there are many more.

If we every come up with a model where more smoking leads to better health, that’s bad. I have enough domain knowledge to say that that should never happen. So maybe I should just make a system where I can say “look this one column with relationship to Y should always be strictly negative”.

Vincent Warmerdam @ Pydata 2019 London

Basically, we can integrate domain knowledge or preferences into our models.

Conclusion: Watch the talk!