Machine Learning Breaking Bad – addressing Bias and Fairness in ML models

Looking ahead to 2018, rising awareness of the impact of bias, and the importance of fairness and transparency, means that data scientists need to go beyond simply optimizing a business metric. We will need to treat these issues seriously, in much the same way we devote resources to fixing security and privacy issues. While there's no comprehensive checklist one can go through to systematically address issues pertaining to fairness, transparency, and accountability, the good news is that the machine learning research community has started to offer suggestions and some initial steps model builders can take. Let me go through a couple of simple examples. Imagine you have an important feature (say, distance from a specific location) of a machine learning model.