Digifesto

Pre-prints of papers accepted to this coming 2019 Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference are floating around Twitter. From the looks of it, many of these papers add a wealth of historical and political context, which I feel is a big improvement.

A noteworthy paper, in this regard, is Hutchinson and Mitchell’s “50 Years of Test (Un)fairness: Lessons for Machine Learning”, which puts recent ‘fairness in machine learning’ work in the context of very analogous debates from the 60’s and 70’s that concerned the use of testing that could be biased due to cultural factors.

I like this paper a lot, in part because it is very thorough and in part because it tees up a line of argument that’s dear to me. Hutchinson and Mitchell raise the question of how to properly think about fairness in machine learning when the protected categories invoked by nondiscrimination law are themselves social constructs.

Some work on practically assessing fairness in ML has tackled the problem of using race as a construct. This echoes concerns in the testing literature that stem back to at least 1966: “one stumbles immediately over the scientific difficulty of establishing clear yardsticks by which people can be classified into convenient racial categories” [30]. Recent approaches have used Fitzpatrick skin type or unsupervised clustering to avoid racial categorizations [7, 55]. We note that the testing literature of the 1960s and 1970s frequently uses the phrase “cultural fairness” when referring to parity between blacks and whites.

They conclude that this is one of the areas where there can be a lot more useful work:

This short review of historical connections in fairness suggest several concrete steps forward for future research in ML fairness: Diving more deeply into the question of how subgroups are defined, suggested as early as 1966 [30], including questioning whether subgroups should be treated as discrete categories at all, and how intersectionality can be modeled. This might include, for example, how to quantify fairness along one dimension (e.g., age) conditioned on another dimension (e.g., skin tone), as recent work has begun to address [27, 39].

This is all very cool to read, because this is precisely the topic that Bruce Haynes and I address in our FAT* paper, “Racial categories in machine learning” (arXiv link). The problem we confront in this paper is that the racial categories we are used to using in the United States (White, Black, Asian) originate in the white supremacy that was enshrined into the Constitution when it was formed and perpetuated since then through the legal system (with some countervailing activity during the Civil Rights Movement, for example). This puts “fair machine learning” researchers in a bind: either they can use these categories, which have always been about perpetuating social inequality, or they can ignore the categories and reproduce the patterns of social inequality that prevail in fact because of the history of race.

In the paper, we propose a third option. First, rather than reify racial categories, we propose breaking race down into the kinds of personal features that get inscribed with racial meaning. Phenotype properties like skin type and ocular folds are one such set of features. Another set are events that indicate position in social class, such as being arrested or receiving welfare. Another set are facts about the national and geographic origin of ones ancestors. These facts about a person are clearly relevant to how racial distinctions are made, but are themselves more granular and multidimensional than race.

The next step is to detect race-like categories by looking at who is segregated from each other. We propose an unsupervised machine learning technique that works with the distribution of the phenotype, class, and ancestry features across spatial tracts (as in when considering where people physically live) or across a social network (as in when considering people’s professional networks, for example). Principal component analysis can identify what race-like dimensions capture the greatest amounts of spatial and social separation. We hypothesize that these dimensions will encode the ways racial categorization has shaped the social structure in tangible ways; these effects may include both politically recognized forms of discrimination as well as forms of discrimination that have not yet been surfaced. These dimensions can then be used to classify people in race-like ways as input to fairness interventions in machine learning.

A key part of our proposal is that race-like classification depends on the empirical distribution of persons in physical and social space, and so are not fixed. This operationalizes the way that race is socially and politically constructed without reifying the categories in terms that reproduce their white supremacist origins.

I’m quite stoked about this research, though obviously it raises a lot of serious challenges in terms of validation.