Data Acquisition for Improving Model Fairness using Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Hasan, Jahid, Pradhan, Romila
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Hasan, Jahid
Pradhan, Romila
author_facet Hasan, Jahid
Pradhan, Romila
contents Machine learning systems are increasingly being used in critical decision making such as healthcare, finance, and criminal justice. Concerns around their fairness have resulted in several bias mitigation techniques that emphasize the need for high-quality data to ensure fairer decisions. However, the role of earlier stages of machine learning pipelines in mitigating model bias has not been explored well. In this paper, we focus on the task of acquiring additional labeled data points for training the downstream machine learning model to rapidly improve its fairness. Since not all data points in a data pool are equally beneficial to the task of fairness, we generate an ordering in which data points should be acquired. We present DataSift, a data acquisition framework based on the idea of data valuation that relies on partitioning and multi-armed bandits to determine the most valuable data points to acquire. Over several iterations, DataSift selects a partition and randomly samples a batch of data points from the selected partition, evaluates the benefit of acquiring the batch on model fairness, and updates the utility of partitions depending on the benefit. To further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of evaluating batches, we leverage influence functions that estimate the effect of acquiring a batch without retraining the model. We empirically evaluate DataSift on several real-world and synthetic datasets and show that the fairness of a machine learning model can be significantly improved even while acquiring a few data points.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_03009
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Data Acquisition for Improving Model Fairness using Reinforcement Learning
Hasan, Jahid
Pradhan, Romila
Machine Learning
Computers and Society
Machine learning systems are increasingly being used in critical decision making such as healthcare, finance, and criminal justice. Concerns around their fairness have resulted in several bias mitigation techniques that emphasize the need for high-quality data to ensure fairer decisions. However, the role of earlier stages of machine learning pipelines in mitigating model bias has not been explored well. In this paper, we focus on the task of acquiring additional labeled data points for training the downstream machine learning model to rapidly improve its fairness. Since not all data points in a data pool are equally beneficial to the task of fairness, we generate an ordering in which data points should be acquired. We present DataSift, a data acquisition framework based on the idea of data valuation that relies on partitioning and multi-armed bandits to determine the most valuable data points to acquire. Over several iterations, DataSift selects a partition and randomly samples a batch of data points from the selected partition, evaluates the benefit of acquiring the batch on model fairness, and updates the utility of partitions depending on the benefit. To further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of evaluating batches, we leverage influence functions that estimate the effect of acquiring a batch without retraining the model. We empirically evaluate DataSift on several real-world and synthetic datasets and show that the fairness of a machine learning model can be significantly improved even while acquiring a few data points.
title Data Acquisition for Improving Model Fairness using Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03009