A practical guide to algorithmic bias and explainability in machine learning
Who is this presentation for?
- Data scientists, software engineers, data engineers, product managers, technical leads, and engineering managers
Level
Description
The concepts of “undesired bias” and “black box models” in machine learning have become a highly discussed topic due to the numerous high profile incidents that have been covered by the media. It’s certainly a challenging topic, as it could even be said that the concept of societal bias is inherently biased in itself, depending on an individual’s (or group’s) perspective.
Alejandro Saucedo doesn’t reinvent the wheel; he simplifies the issue of AI explainability so it can be solved using traditional methods. He covers the high-level definitions of bias in machine learning to remove ambiguity and demystifies it through a hands-on example, in which the objective is to automate the loan-approval process for a company using machine learning, which allows you to go through this challenge step by step and use key tools and techniques from the latest research together with domain expert knowledge at the right points to enable you to explain decisions and mitigate undesired bias in machine learning models.
Alejandro breaks undesired bias down into two constituent parts: a priori societal bias and a posteriori statistical bias, with tangible examples of how undesired bias is introduced in each step, and you’ll learn some very interesting research findings in this topic. Spoiler alert: Alejandro takes a pragmatic approach, showing how any nontrivial system will always have an inherent bias, so the objective is not to remove bias, but to make sure you can get as close as possible to your objectives and make sure your objectives are as close as possible to the ideal solution.
You’ll assess bias in machine learning through three key steps, each with a real-life example: data analysis, inference result analysis, and production metrics analysis. Automating the loan-approval process will show bias that affects your results in a negative way, and you’ll learn techniques to ensure you perform a reasonable analysis as well as key touch points and metrics to ensure the right domain experts are involved. By the time you leave, you’ll have covered the fundamental topics in data science, such as feature importance analysis, class imbalance assessment, model evaluation metrics, partial dependence, feature correlation, etc. More importantly, you’ll understand how these fundamentals can interact at different touch points with the right domain experts to ensure undesired bias is identified and documented. All will be covered with a hands-on example through a practical Jupyter notebook experience.
Prerequisite knowledge
- Experience with a machine learning project
What you'll learn
- Gain a high-level overview of bias in machine learning
- Learn key tools and techniques to assess, identify, and mitigate risks that arise from the unavoidable bias present
Alejandro Saucedo
The Institute for Ethical AI & Machine Learning
Alejandro is the Chief Scientist at the Institute for Ethical AI & Machine Learning, where he leads highly technical research on machine learning explainability, bias evaluation, reproducibility and responsible design. With over 10 years of software development experience, Alejandro has held technical leadership positions across hyper-growth scale-ups and tech giants including Eigen Tchnologies, Bloomberg LP and Hack Partners. He has a strong track record building departments of machine learning engineers from scratch, and leading the delivery of large-scale machine learning system across the financial, insurance, legal, transport, manufacturing and construction sectors (in Europe, US and Latin America).
Presented by
Elite Sponsors
Strategic Sponsors
Zettabyte Sponsors
Contributing Sponsors
Exabyte Sponsors
Content Sponsor
Impact Sponsors
Supporting Sponsor
Non Profit
Contact us
confreg@oreilly.com
For conference registration information and customer service
partners@oreilly.com
For more information on community discounts and trade opportunities with O’Reilly conferences
strataconf@oreilly.com
For information on exhibiting or sponsoring a conference
pr@oreilly.com
For media/analyst press inquires