Thoughts On Machine Learning Accuracy Amazon Web Services

Let's start with some comments about a recent ACLU blog in which they run a facial recognition trial. Using Rekognition, the ACLU built a face database using 25,000 publicly available arrest photos and then performed facial similarity searches of that database using public photos of all current members of Congress. They found 28 incorrect matches out of 535, using an 80% confidence level; this is a 5% misidentification (sometimes called'false positive') rate and a 95% accuracy rate. The ACLU has not published its data set, methodology, or results in detail, so we can only go on what they've publicly said. To illustrate the impact of confidence threshold on false positives, we ran a test where we created a face collection using a dataset of over 850,000 faces commonly used in academia.