From Pre-labeling to Production: Engineering Lessons from a Machine Learning Pipeline in the Public Sector

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ferreira, Ronivaldo, da Silva, Guilherme, Rocha, Carla, Pinto, Gustavo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ferreira, Ronivaldo
da Silva, Guilherme
Rocha, Carla
Pinto, Gustavo
author_facet Ferreira, Ronivaldo
da Silva, Guilherme
Rocha, Carla
Pinto, Gustavo
contents Machine learning is increasingly being embedded into government digital platforms, but public-sector constraints make it difficult to build ML systems that are accurate, auditable, and operationally sustainable. In practice, teams face not only technical issues like extreme class imbalance and data drift, but also organizational barriers such as bureaucratic data access, lack of versioned datasets, and incomplete governance over provenance and monitoring. Our study of the Brasil Participativo (BP) platform shows that common engineering choices -- like using LLMs for pre-labeling, splitting models into routed classifiers, and generating synthetic data -- can speed development but also introduce new traceability, reliability, and cost risks if not paired with disciplined data governance and human validation. This means that, in the public sector, responsible ML is not just a modeling problem but an institutional engineering problem, and ML pipelines must be treated as civic infrastructure. Ultimately, this study shows that the success of machine learning in the public sector will depend less on breakthroughs in model accuracy and more on the ability of institutions to engineer transparent, reproducible, and accountable data infrastructures that citizens can trust.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01545
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Pre-labeling to Production: Engineering Lessons from a Machine Learning Pipeline in the Public Sector
Ferreira, Ronivaldo
da Silva, Guilherme
Rocha, Carla
Pinto, Gustavo
Software Engineering
Computers and Society
Machine learning is increasingly being embedded into government digital platforms, but public-sector constraints make it difficult to build ML systems that are accurate, auditable, and operationally sustainable. In practice, teams face not only technical issues like extreme class imbalance and data drift, but also organizational barriers such as bureaucratic data access, lack of versioned datasets, and incomplete governance over provenance and monitoring. Our study of the Brasil Participativo (BP) platform shows that common engineering choices -- like using LLMs for pre-labeling, splitting models into routed classifiers, and generating synthetic data -- can speed development but also introduce new traceability, reliability, and cost risks if not paired with disciplined data governance and human validation. This means that, in the public sector, responsible ML is not just a modeling problem but an institutional engineering problem, and ML pipelines must be treated as civic infrastructure. Ultimately, this study shows that the success of machine learning in the public sector will depend less on breakthroughs in model accuracy and more on the ability of institutions to engineer transparent, reproducible, and accountable data infrastructures that citizens can trust.
title From Pre-labeling to Production: Engineering Lessons from a Machine Learning Pipeline in the Public Sector
topic Software Engineering
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01545